STATEMENT

I work to understand glaciers in their absence, through the traces they have left in the Great Lakes region where I live. I don’t have much of a choice but to imagine them. There is a reverence of the unseen and I try to understand it in ways that end up feeling like ritual. Replicating glacial behaviors, mimicking glacial processes, mapping the glacial movement of stones and clay, recreating glacial functions at human scale, playing with the possibilities at a landscape scale, and bridging across time to connect ice ages from the deep past with ice ages of the deep future. The work I produce and the tools I build prime actual landscapes for collaborative activation in the deep future when my objects will yield to the geologic force of the next glacier in the next ice age.

BIO

RYAN DEWEY works in sculpture, research, and land art, looking at connections between people, places, and land use to produce a kind of ecological dreaming. Donna Haraway has called his work one of her favorite examples of art about the anthropocene in her book Staying With The Trouble. His archive is housed at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. He has lived on several islands, in several jungles, in one desert, on one mountain, and on two of the five Great Lakes. He is a member of the American Society of Polar Philatelists and has received residencies at ACRE (Chicago), the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland), and the Montello Foundation (Nevada), and he serves as visiting researcher in cognitive science at Case Western Reserve University where he wrote the open-access book Hack the Experience: New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (Punctum Books, 2018).

CV

Ryan Dewey

Cleveland, Ohio

Education

  • MA, Cognitive Linguistics
    Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (2012)
    Thesis: A Sense of Space: Conceptualization in Way-Finding and Navigation (2012)

Residencies & Fellowships

  • Pollinator (invited) - Foundation for Contemporary Arts alum appointment (2025)

  • Montello Foundation, Montello, Nevada (2019)

  • Alps Art Academy, Land Art Biennale, Safiental, Switzerland (2018)

  • Non//Sense Residency, Gordon Square Arts District, Cleveland, Ohio (2018)

  • ACRE Residency, Steuben, Wisconsin & Chicago, Illinois (2017)

Archives & Collections

  • Center for Art + Environment, Nevada Museum of Art - An Attempt To Understand a Glacier Without Ever Having Seen One, Collection CAE2217, (2022)

  • Solastalgic Archive, University of New Mexico Museum of Art, Albuquerque, New Mexico (2019)

  • Progressive Insurance Collection, Cleveland, Ohio (2018)

  • SLA, Copenhagen, Denmark (2018)

  • Tri-C STEM Center, Cleveland, Ohio (2019)

Awards & Grants (selected)

  • Foundation for Contemporary Arts - Emergency Grant (2019)

  • Individual Excellence Award, Ohio Arts Council (2019)

Solo Exhibitions

  • Lines of Descent, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, Ohio (2019)

  • Sowing Seeds of Discontent, Baldwin Wallace University, Berea, Ohio (2018)

  • Seen / Unseen / Not Seen, Muted Horn, Cleveland, Ohio (2017)

  • Improbable Oceans, Kickstarter (2015)

Group Exhibitions (selected)

  • Survey #25, SHED Projects, Cleveland, Ohio (2025)

  • This Earth: Notes and Observations by Montello Foundation Artists, Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, Utah (2021)

  • Small Works, Abattoir Gallery, Cleveland, Ohio (2021)

  • Full Fathom Five, Progressive Insurance Collection Museum, Cleveland, Ohio (2018)

  • A Shadow as a Stain, ACRE Projects, Chicago, Illinois (2018)

  • Ohio Artists for Freedoms, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio (2018)

  • Alps Art Academy Showcase, Safiental, Switzerland (2018)

  • Non//Sense, Uncommon Senses 2, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada (2018)

  • Underneath Is Before (collaborative), SPACES, Cleveland, Ohio 2016

Publications

  • Decoding Quarry Workflows, FIELD OFFICE (2025)

  • “Volcanoes Are the Original 3D Printer, Everything Else is Geomimicry,” Mid-America Print Council Journal, Vol. 32/33 (2021)

  • “Lines of Descent,” FRINGES Landscape Observatory (2020)

  • Hack the Experience: New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science, Punctum Books (2018)

  • “Reflections on Binational Urbanism,” Archinect (2016)

  • “Hacking Remoteness through Viewpoint and Cognition,” KERB, Melbourne (2014)

  • “Agency and the Multifaceted Stories of Hybrid Places,” MONU, Rotterdam (2014)

  • A Sense of Space: Conceptualization in Way-Finding and Navigation, MA Thesis, Case Western Reserve University (2012)

Select Talks & Presentations

  • Material Grounds, University of Southern California, USC Landscape Architecture (February 25, 2021)

  • This Stone Wants to Go Home, Institute for Land and Environmental Art, Tenna, Switzerland (2020)

  • Restriction & Imagination, Universidade do Porto, Porto, Portugal (2020)

  • Landscaping the Deep Future, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio (2019)

  • Artists on Art: Alexis Rockman, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, Ohio (2018)

  • Looking to Geologic Pasts to Imagine Future Worlds, SPACES, Cleveland, Ohio (2018)

  • Designing a Research-Based Practice, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, Ohio (2015)

  • Virtual Places: Core Logging the Anthropocene in Real-Time, Paper presented to the Association of American Geographers annual convention, Chicago, Illinois (2015)

Press & Critical Reception (selected)

  • Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus, Virginia Burrus, University of Chicago Press (2023), pp. 103-105, 108, 112-113.

  • Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway, Duke University Press (2016). P.181

  • “La Val Stussavgia ha carmalà il’s artists,” Donatella Bonifaze, Sil Punct RTR Switzerland (July 9, 2018)

  • Interview by Elena Cremona, The Earth Issue (2017)

  • Warren Ellis, Orbital Operations (2015)

  • Nicola Twilley, “Supply Chain Seasoning,” Edible Geography (2015)

Research Appointments

  • Visiting Researcher, Cognitive Science
    Department of Cognitive Science, Case Western Reserve University
    2025, 2014-2015, 2012-2013

Fieldwork

  • Ethnographic & Linguistic Research

    • Nigeria (2004-2005)

    • Papua New Guinea (2001)

Professional Memberships (active)

  • Member, American Society of Polar Philatelists

Studio & Advisory Practice

Ryan Dewey operates at the intersection of sculpture, systems architecture, and cognitive science. His dual approach bridges field-based art and terrain-driven advisory, producing both tangible artworks and strategic frameworks. As the founder of GEOCOG, he develops tools for institutions and stakeholders confronting spatial, perceptual, and infrastructural challenges. His work has served cultural institutions, research labs, environmental stakeholders, and strategic firms. Capabilities include: Terrain-driven systems modeling & foresight; Cognitive architectures for navigation & spatial reasoning; Knowledge systems for ambiguity & change; Conceptual landform models rooted in geologic processes; Field-tested frameworks for site transformation & adaptive reuse.