Born in Houston, Texas in 1981, Browning now lives in Doha, Qatar. In his creative work, he explores imagery and compositional strategies inspired by interactive and fictional worlds within popular media western art history. His production methods mix traditional materials and forms with techniques employing emerging media. His work includes paintings, sculptures, craft objects, and digital media artworks that depict compressed, dreamlike spaces, abstracted characters, and inventive objects. His work has been written about in The New York Times, ARTnews, ArtMaze Magazine, Art F City, and others. He has exhibited at ADA Gallery (Richmond, VA), Mother Gallery (Beacon, NY), Resort Baltimore (Baltimore, MD), Mulherin Pollard (NYC), Allegra LaViola (NYC), VOLTA NY (NYC), The Fire Station Museum (Doha, Qatar), Menage Gallery (St. Petersburg, RU), L21 Gallery (Palma de Mallorca, Spain) and others. He is represented by ADA Gallery and is an Associate Professor at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar, where he teaches art foundations and emerging media."
"My paintings and sculptures depict cartoonish objects and figurative elements in flattened and sometimes stage-like environments. I think of the shallow space appearing inside the edges of my paintings as a place to be occupied - a Miroesque space to fall into. Characters sometimes reach into the frame, or wait just beyond its edge. I use a broad variety of media, including oils, gouache, 3D printed plastics, ceramics, fiber, found objects, and others, to produce artworks that I imagine moving in and out of two and three dimensional space. I explore collage-like layered realities, virtuality and role play, and the charismatic power of objects through this spectrum of media exploration, imagining each work as a narrative component within an entangled whole."
For the past few years Ryan has been commissioning rugs from weavers in Pakistan by sending them a painting and having them recreate the piece into a wool rug using their thousands of years old rug making skills. And since many of his paintings over the years are thought of as imaginary video games, the tufts of wool seem to mimic 8-bit video.
