Dreaming big

RYAN AD is Jamaican-Grenadian, lives in Winnipeg and receives iPhone notifications in French.

One of these notifications recently gave the photographer (who goes by his artist name) good news: a prestigious Parisian art gallery was interested in featuring two of his photographs in one of its exhibitions. One was captured in Manitoba, the other in Jamaica.

“I felt a constant sense of community in Jamaica. You’ll walk down the road and people will talk to you,” he says. “Here you have to be buying something to exist in most places.”

One photo, entitled Born Underwater, is a gentle depiction of Lake Winnipeg, reminiscent of Wanda Koop for its symmetry and pastel-like softness. The other, Myself When Young, shows a man leaning on an old car with its hood popped, a glimpse into Jamaica’s culture of repair and resourcefulness.

The gallery, Espace Parallèle, is now selling these works for about $1,400 per print.

“I was psyched about this Paris show, but I showed at (Winnipeg’s) Urban Shaman in January, and… I was like, dude, I’m showing at Urban Shaman. It’s so important,” says the 33-year-old artist. “(But) the prints are going for like four times as much in Paris as I would sell them for in galleries here.”

He appreciates Winnipeg’s comparatively cheap rent, but wishes its cultural markets thrived like a big city’s.

“People have a hell of a lot of money here; they just don’t like admitting it… it’s not cool to flex your wealth,” he says. He suggests that local arts patrons tend to wait for cues from the major institutions about what to collect.

At the same time, he says internationalism — though it’s been good to him lately — can also be an exploitative force, seducing artists with empty promises of global visibility and opportunity.

For over five years, he’s worked as a freelance photographer for leading multinational fashion labels, an experience that’s left him a little jaded.

“The feeling of paying bills with my camera is very cool, and I feel like that’s where it stops at being cool. Having to run companies down for money they owe you for contracts that you signed, and having to be your own enforcer, it sucks,” he says.

He was born in Edmonton and grew up in Winnipeg — where his work has been featured at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Plug-In ICA, Nuit Blanche and nearly everywhere in between — but has spent the last five years in Montreal.

He’s back in Winnipeg for now, and is thinking optimistically about what it means to be an ambitious Prairie artist with an eye for the international. He’s currently at work on a book of art photography, which he describes as “an interrogation of dreams and the weirdness of the Black Prairie cultural interzone.”

The same sensibilities are stamped on much of his existing art, viewable on his website ryan.ad, where striking depictions of local bands such as Super Duty Tough Work live alongside scenes of Haitian parades in Montreal and Parisian street art.

He describes the experience of Black diaspora as “fragmentary,” but as also connecting artists to an exciting, cosmopolitan world beyond Winnipeg’s horizons.

“In Canada and the U.S. there’s a sense of identity across the Black polities on Turtle Island,” he says. “But the old Winnipeg canon, it’s not enough … Who are the First Nations (and Black) kids who had punk bands, who were writing graffiti in the ’90s? (I worry) the archives there are lost.”

He hopes more young Winnipeg artists will recognize that their work belongs not just underground or in back alleys but in galleries and institutions here and beyond.

Yet — as he contemplates his experimental book, his desire to remake Prairie canons, his longing to reconcile the local and the global — he’s also wryly aware of the ambition of his vision.

“It’s very important to be delusional to have a successful art practice … It’s just, like, dreaming really big,” he says.

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.com