Ryan Lauderdale is a Brooklyn-based artist who was born in Cushing, Oklahoma, and graduated from Hunter College in 2012 with an MFA in Combined Media. It’s fitting that we discovered him on Pinterest, as his thesis project dealt with the way parts of culture and history get presented, remixed, and diluted online. “What we think of as a tidy and linear historical timeline becomes wholly strange and interconnected when looking at specific visual historical threads such as car design or mall architecture,” he writes in his project description. “We see how hopes and dreams were passed from one source only to be modulated to different aims by another. The Internet, with all of its archiving potential, further establishes this rhizomatic worldview as reality. Nodes of information collide, mix and hybridize. It is here that the potential for new cultural material can grow.” Sight Unseen is the first to debut Lauderdale’s thesis — pictured in the first two images below — as well as work he’s done since and has yet to post on his portfolio site.

Above: Lauderdale’s 2012 thesis project. “Our online world is governed by the same rules as our living rooms,” he writes. “A blog or Facebook wall is like a coffee table where objects and artifacts can be shown to a visitor, usually in the hopes of projecting an idealized self, an aspirational self. In my work I have created mental rooms, possible interiors embedded with the digitally preserved aspirations of our recent cultural past. The hope is to create a kind of mood board, shapes and objects plundered from the archive and cobbled together, with the potential to be greater than the sum of their individual parts and histories.