It wanted to teach the world to sing (in perfect harmony) is a full-colour, offset lithograph printed book comprised of over 200 images in which a “mysterious and somewhat hypnotising” image exists in diverse circumstances all across the world.

The images in the book were created from found magazine photographs and collage. Each abstraction, a simple coloured-pencil drawing of lines radiation out from a central point, was hand-drawn and interjected into each found image through a process of cutting and gluing. The spread of hte image functions as perhaps the logical conclusion of an idea applicable, understandable or desired by a universal audience. The image exists as an icon, but its purpose and affect is uncertain. It variously functions as a node of discovery, dissemination, contemplation, celebration, or control: the result of scientific research, a piece in an art gallery, a page in a text-book, transmitted on television, on placards, in corporate lobbies, in utopian houses ….

Available from the artist.

Ryan Park’s work is made in response to the processes of apprehension between an individual and the world. Working with sculpture, photography, found materials, or text, he attempts to give form to a state in which identity and function are constantly in flux, contingent on situation, private intentions, and social conventions.

I often make use of the familiar, or the common, as a means of instant, and collective recognition: to make the work accessible to a wide audience and to frame the complexity of interactions, desires, assumptions, and precepts brought to even the most ordinary of images, objects, and actions. My work stems from elaborated sketches, small connections that propose avenues for further analysis. Experimental replication and repetition is a common strategy that I employ in my process, a tendency informed by my scientific background. Rather than definitive conclusions, my experiments often lead to perceptual and logical limbo.

Born in Calgary and raised in Langley BC, Park received a BFA from teh Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and is currently in the MFA program at the University of Guelph.