Steve Gurysh

BIo

Steve Gurysh (b. Winston-Salem, NC; lives and works in Lawrence, KS) has received numerous awards, including residencies at Wassaic Project, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, WATERSHED+ Dynamic Environment Lab and a fellowship at the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Between 2012 and 2017, Gurysh co-founded and co-directed The Drift, a collaborative platform that explored rivers as a context, site, and material for temporary art in the public realm. He has been commissioned to create permanent public artworks in Pittsburgh, PA and Calgary, Canada; and has exhibited his work in venues such as the Knockdown Center, Queens, New York; W139, Amsterdam; El Museo de la Ciudad, Quer‌‌étaro, Mexico; La Soci‌ét‌é des Arts Technologiques, Montréal; The Engine Room, Wellington, New Zealand; and in the center of the Ohio River. Gurysh is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Department of Visual Art at the University of Kansas, where he has taught since 2020.

Artist Statement

Steve Gurysh is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is recognized by a fluid approach to process and material, responding to communal and beyond-human ways of understanding place, objects, technology and planetary phenomena. Through sculpture, time-based media, and art in the public realm, his practice compresses expansive logics into potent objects and experiences that contain wild materialities, transformative social contracts, digital to physical translations and speculative relationships to time. His projects are often developed in collaboration and correspondence with scientists, engineers, communities, other artists, and non-human participants. Recent projects include the transformation of uranium ore into a photograph of the ceremonial sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, the meticulous reproduction of graffitied river rocks along a glacial river, the recreation of a column from an astronomical observatory carved into the volume of a 300-year-old wind fallen oak tree to the gifting of a series of tree planting tools made from an iron meteorite to the caretakers of a city park.

Exhibitions