On View: Thursday, March 27 – Thursday, May 8, 2025
Artist Lecture: Thursday, March 27, 2025 at 5:00 – 6:00 PM | Graham, Hillyer Hall
Opening Reception: Thursday, March 27, 2025 at 6:00 – 7:00 PM | Oresman Gallery, Hillyer Hall

Logan Ryland Dandridge is a time-based artist from Richmond, Virginia who examines the poetics of sacred music, mythology, and the surreal. As a researcher, he explores ancestry, diaspora, and spirituality through an interdisciplinary art-practice, developing themes of nostalgia, ontology, and collective memory into an experimental continuum of fantasy and repose. As a filmmaker, his work concentrates on the American south and employs a combination of video assemblage, electronic music, and critical writing. Recently, his films has been exhibited in North America and Europe including exhibitions supported by Girton College, Ox-Bow School of Art, Modern Art Oxford, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Red Bull Arts Detroit, Second Street Gallery, 1708 Gallery, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. As for the here and now, Logan is thinking about what Curtis Mayfield did for D’Angelo’s harmonies, Allen Iverson’s cornrow braids, and the rusted Chevrolet pickup truck at his late-grandfather’s home.

Prominent ideas featured in my recent work reimagine Appalachian forests and large bodies of water as sites of ancestral communion. Other such natural sites, Toni Morrison believed “have a perfect memory.” Water, in this way, as well as all natural life flow through, around, and in spite of us all. This research merges interviews of Nina Simone, Etta James, and Toni Morrison into a single stream of consciousness. Related connections include the experience of growing up in rural parts of Virginia where the presence of the supernatural feels deeply imbued in the land. In my practice the image is a testimony and sound is a vessel. What emerges is a collision between logic and being, wonder and utility, speculation and revolution.

If I show up in the shape of a sound, will you recognize me?