Ryder Ripps

Ryder Ripps (born July 7, 1986) is a conceptual artist living in New York City. He is the creative director of OKFocus, a digital marketing and design agency. Adrian Chen of the New York Times called Mr. Ripps "... the consummate Internet cool kid, as fluent in HTML and JavaScript as in the language of conceptual art..." In 2013, Ripps created the branding for Soylent, an open source meal replacement drink. He is also a music producer with recent credits on Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. Ripps received a BA from The New School. He is an alumnus of City As School, class of 2004.

Ripp's work has been included in many group shows, including MoMA PS1, New York, Eyebeam, New York, Carroll/Fletcher, London, and the Royal College of Art, London. He has lectured at Rhizome, ForYourArt and Sotheby's.

Ripps is the creator of several websites, including Internet Archeology, Dump.fm, and V-Files.

Ripps' first solo exhibition in January 2015 at Postmasters Gallery in New York City, titled "HO". featured large-scale oil paintings, portraits derived from the Instagram account of model Adrianne Ho. "Rips transformed self-portraits she posted online into expressive, highly distorted pictures. Abstract passages reference the heroic gestures of the Action Painters and are generated through fingers moving across the decidedly unheroic touchscreen - the new site of aggression and anxiety in the age of the "virtual male gaze", where the archetypal macho painter has been emasculated. Through constant self-awareness and mediation... Self becomes malleable, brands now arbitrate beauty: pop culture personas become brands, their authenticity is manipulated by multiple filters and amplified by mass circulation. Ryder Ripps' portraits become a dissection of and a subjugated homage to, his empowered subject as he updates the conversation about the place of painting in contemporary culture.

Ryder Ripps's solo exhibition at Red Bull Studios in February 2015 was a large scale installation in which he materialized the Internet. He "exaggerates the relationship between the content consumer, illuminating the physical solitude of virtual relationships". In this dual level exhibition, viewers become voyeurs surveilling the performative Internet experience. On the lower floor of the space, users can be seen working on the internet. Their activity is visible on monitors upstairs, inside a shipping crate where the performance enacts the corporal aspects of a network. i-D Magazine ran an interview with the artist about the project: https://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/article/how-ryder-ripps-is-making-the-internet

In 2016, New media artist Matt Starr organized a Bernie Sanders-themed art exhibition "Weekend with Bernie" for Wayfarers Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. The exhibition featured Ripps's installation art "Faces of Bernie Sanders Dank Meme Stash" which included Skype video chats with members of the Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash. The exhibition raised over $10,000 dollars in donations to the Sanders presidential campaign.