https://ryatyezbick.com ryatyezbick Wed, 30 Jul 2025 04:28:42 +0000 https://ryatyezbick.com en https://ryatyezbick.com/Slideshow Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:54:42 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Slideshow Work&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;About&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;CV&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;News https://ryatyezbick.com/Featured-Projects Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:54:43 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Featured-Projects Epicurus’ Conundrum&nbsp;in Cover Me2018 <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ec77d28aa4b19289210353c90e798a0a52c010426e368975a831d4f1f4d13422/EC-Promo-10.png" data-mid="114241779" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ec77d28aa4b19289210353c90e798a0a52c010426e368975a831d4f1f4d13422/EC-Promo-10.png" /> It’s kind of a Scary Feeling in Cover Me2018 <img width="1680" height="1120" width_o="1680" height_o="1120" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/d0ea8a06533aadae77d1ebf04ea8f895bf539edef469d21f859c406ac5cde619/4_Rachel-Yezbick_Cover-Me_Garden_Its-kind-of-a-scary-feeling_Exhibition.jpg" data-mid="114241780" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/d0ea8a06533aadae77d1ebf04ea8f895bf539edef469d21f859c406ac5cde619/4_Rachel-Yezbick_Cover-Me_Garden_Its-kind-of-a-scary-feeling_Exhibition.jpg" /> Potentially Dangerous Contraptions&nbsp;at the Akademie Schloss Solitude2018 <img width="2282" height="1335" width_o="2282" height_o="1335" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a717e95afed998cbdf20b7d7a5fcf28336f4fabba8f2928da6dff91f672a4f8d/headtrap_portfolio_less-yellow.png" data-mid="114241782" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a717e95afed998cbdf20b7d7a5fcf28336f4fabba8f2928da6dff91f672a4f8d/headtrap_portfolio_less-yellow.png" /> Coinfectionin progress2016-present <img width="1920" height="1080" width_o="1920" height_o="1080" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/053a5385f16cc1bbd5b05d75f811bcf98d6c82a72b779d5318a5f9918f2363d4/Coinfection_trailer.png" data-mid="114241781" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/053a5385f16cc1bbd5b05d75f811bcf98d6c82a72b779d5318a5f9918f2363d4/Coinfection_trailer.png" /> Work Archive ︎ https://ryatyezbick.com/Text Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:54:44 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Text Contactrachel.yezbick[at]gmail.com https://ryatyezbick.com/Works-2 Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:54:44 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Works-2 RYAT YEZBICK&nbsp; https://ryatyezbick.com/News-1 Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:54:44 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/News-1 Upcoming | Current&nbsp; The Innocence of Unknowing, New Images, Paris, France Choreographies of Retreat, Solo exhibition at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary, Los Angeles&nbsp; Recent Exhibitions The Innocence of Unknowing, Khoj for Are You Human?, New Delhi The Innocence of Unknowing premiered at Tribeca Film Festival (Immersive) 2025Fellow at Onassis ONX Studio, 2025Fellow at the MIT Open Documentary Lab 2023-2025 Grip, the Lab, San Francisco, CA Grip, Human Resources, CAPotentially Dangerous Contraptions, curated by Emji Saint Spero, 2220 Arts, Los Angeles, CACollision Practice in A Place to Stay at the LGBT Center, Curated by Pau S. Pescador, Los Angeles, CA Recent News Jazz Tangcay, Matt Minton, Abigail Lee, and Lauren Coates, Tribeca Festival Launches Immersive Technology Exhibit ‘In Search of Us’ – Film News in Brief, MSN (April 24, 2025) Kent Bye, Tribeca Immersive Curators on the 2025 Selection of Impact Projects Curated by Onassis ONX, Agog, &amp; Tribeca, Voices of VR (June 4, 2025) Jazz Tangcay, Matt Minton, Abigail Lee, and Lauren Coates, Tribeca Festival Launches Immersive Technology Exhibit ‘In Search of Us’ – Film News in Brief, Variety (April 24, 2025) David Morgan, At 2025 Tribeca Festival VR, augement reality, and AI showcase immersive storytelling, CBS News (June 11, 2025) https://ryatyezbick.com/Choreographies-of-Retreat Tue, 20 Jul 2021 14:54:54 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Choreographies-of-Retreat Choreographies of Retreat 2026 Solo exhibition at Reisig and Taylor Contemporary in Los Angeles.&nbsp;Duration: March 07 - April 04, 2026. Spring. <img width="5250" height="3500" width_o="5250" height_o="3500" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/cde798a5d804774b899c1da41f0d043a1f56db955b659e0648ea4340c051a53a/_COR_chalk-bright.jpg" data-mid="247247194" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/cde798a5d804774b899c1da41f0d043a1f56db955b659e0648ea4340c051a53a/_COR_chalk-bright.jpg" /> <img width="5250" height="3451" width_o="5250" height_o="3451" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/954cf7ac367c0fc53182e96121f269bc1dd722bde110646be234f7fcec6311e4/_COR_install_1B.jpg" data-mid="247247199" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/954cf7ac367c0fc53182e96121f269bc1dd722bde110646be234f7fcec6311e4/_COR_install_1B.jpg" /> Reisig and Taylor Contemporary is presenting Choreographies of Retreat by Ryat Yezbick. This exhibition continues their ongoing project The Innocence of Unknowing (2020–present), which premiered at the 2025 Tribeca Festival Immersive program as an archival documentary, essay film, and live performance in collaboration with Milo Talwani and a specially trained AI humanities scholar named “Aurora.” For this installation of the project evolved (site-specifically) for the gallery at 603 N Western Avenue in Los Angeles, the expanded cinematic work extends through new video and performance pieces, as well as sculpture and photographic media. Developed through archival analysis of mass shootings in the United States, the social, historical, and geopolitical scope of the project rewinds from the present moment to the mid-1960s—spanning more than 700 news clips over nearly 60 years (starting with the University of Texas at Austin “tower shooting” in 1966). But the work is not primarily engaged with the accumulation of this footage, nor the particular violence or criminal status of the perpetrator of these events. Instead, the problems and questions guiding the project are focused on the optics, medias, technologies, rhetorics, controls, and repeated (bodily) gestures embedded within—and circulating throughout—the sensationalized scenes and selective documentations of mass shootings in the U.S.: “By removing perpetrators entirely, the project shifts attention to the relationship between the state, victims, and spectators, asking how U.S. media culture repeatedly stages innocence, compliance, and authority.” With this shift, the work unwinds the vulnerable place of a body along these discrete but interconnected positions and discourses of collective memory, media coverage (‘news’), mass surveillance, and “choreographies of retreat”—or, “the repeated bodily gestures—hands raised, bodies herded, movement arrested—that appear across decades of crisis footage.” At the same time, this project necessarily works-through the complex translations between events, spectacles, records (or accounts), and the public distribution of information as visual materials and languages. These problems of translation and transmission pose questions of how we (as spectators, observers, viewers, audiences) see ourselves watching, or watch ourselves looking—questions about the kinds of mirrors we make and shatter through a collective un/consciousness of mass shootings and gun violence. Questions of how we are conditioned and what we are taught through repetitions of mass watching. Questions of why these events are seen and categorized the way they are. (For example, why are ‘mass shootings’ marked as distinct from acts of terrorism?) Here, the role of the mirror is performed by Aurora the AI humanities scholar developed for the project through a training based on a series of humanities texts. Usually, or at least at the level of its corporate-industrial complex, AI is a data-sorting tool and a predictive model (and, more and more often, a weapon of mass surveillance). However, Aurora’s humanities-based training sets up the possibility of working with AI as an ethical envoy into our own systems of power, with its education “enabling it to generate frame-level analysis and metadata [of the archival footage] that foreground structural power, racialization, and normativity.” A mirror for the frame-by-frame mis en abyme of the ‘mass’ populating any individual reality (and its choreographies between others). Between these tangled systems, subjects, and scenes, the variable mediums of the exhibition make-room for what is usually pushed beyond the gazed boundaries of ‘the picture,’ collapsing the media’s forgetful distance between audiences and victims. Making-room for kinds of collective memory that are not pre-fabricated en masse, making-room for a conscious, desublimated and non-passive processing of the violence of mass shootings—and “the fear, flight, and immense sorrow and pain”—they inflict and portray. Between a lived experience and its doubles. https://ryatyezbick.com/The-Innocence-of-Unknowing Wed, 30 Jul 2025 04:28:42 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/The-Innocence-of-Unknowing The Innocence of Unknowing&nbsp; 2025 Premiered at Tribeca Immersive Film Festival&nbsp; The Innocence of Unknowing investigates news media coverage of mass shootings in the United States since the 1960s. This immersive essay film - performed live by Ryat Yezbick, Milo Talwani, and the AI humanities scholar they built - takes viewers back in time to examine how we have arrived at the horrific reality of rampant gun violence in America today. Created from an archive of news media footage sourced by Yezbick, The Innocence of Unknowing examines our role as spectators of mass shootings while illustrating the history of the evolving media landscape — from TV to phones to social media — through which we make sense of the violence. This project is the first of its kind to examine our historical relationship to eyewitness news through the lens of AI. <img width="2400" height="1600" width_o="2400" height_o="1600" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5885d3393312d9524837ca2e1d77faca04c143076a308a1f87115f2e70740011/TribecaImmersive2025_Instagram_OnassisONX_0008-2.JPG" data-mid="236425021" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5885d3393312d9524837ca2e1d77faca04c143076a308a1f87115f2e70740011/TribecaImmersive2025_Instagram_OnassisONX_0008-2.JPG" /> https://ryatyezbick.com/Drawing-Chalk Wed, 06 Mar 2024 21:39:56 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Drawing-Chalk Drawing Chalk&nbsp; 2023 - ongoing&nbsp; Initial piece created at the Headlands Center for the Arts&nbsp; <img width="4341" height="2933" width_o="4341" height_o="2933" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/7c2145925e3a1379cc01dbc7c94ff221f0c18135c6106a5b829a114b18b294fb/drone-chalk-social-media_no-white-frame.jpg" data-mid="206205125" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/7c2145925e3a1379cc01dbc7c94ff221f0c18135c6106a5b829a114b18b294fb/drone-chalk-social-media_no-white-frame.jpg" /> Drawing Chalk is an ongoing drawing practice with various public’s impacted by gun violence. The work explores our societal relationship to firearms and mass shootings through the lens of a playground. Participants were given pastel pieces of chalk in the shape of guns and were asked to draw various images from news media coverage of mass shootings using the objects, effectively grinding them into dust. This work examines the impact random acts of violence have on the collective psyche by turning a play pastime into a stage for collective anxieties around gun violence. By physically grinding the chalk guns into powder, the performance becomes a symbolic act of firearm disposal while rendering new visual interpretations around the influence of public violence on our bodies and psyches. <img width="1240" height="967" width_o="1240" height_o="967" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4ffafabc024241d13590d8193e0b8eb99e3c0336a48291483bd1c4baaa4e17a5/06_Remnants-2.jpg" data-mid="206204234" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4ffafabc024241d13590d8193e0b8eb99e3c0336a48291483bd1c4baaa4e17a5/06_Remnants-2.jpg" /> <img width="1240" height="696" width_o="1240" height_o="696" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e4cd2d28a680a61f5b0e4ab291656ecfdc58f512ee3c7d0be86d75b5f988d450/07_Remnants-.jpg" data-mid="206204236" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/e4cd2d28a680a61f5b0e4ab291656ecfdc58f512ee3c7d0be86d75b5f988d450/07_Remnants-.jpg" /><img width="1240" height="698" width_o="1240" height_o="698" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/85040a46d412a324a4a79d4b58155b3d94ea7935421a19a6169c37ba5df1628d/06_Remnants-4.jpg" data-mid="206204235" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/85040a46d412a324a4a79d4b58155b3d94ea7935421a19a6169c37ba5df1628d/06_Remnants-4.jpg" /> https://ryatyezbick.com/Collision-Practice Mon, 29 May 2023 17:24:24 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/Collision-Practice Collision Practice&nbsp; 2023&nbsp; <img width="6490" height="4388" width_o="6490" height_o="4388" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c99ffaf27fa8e1c0e6a2d2aa52b9b42e77436cf17b8058e5325cbb040ed74730/collisionpractice_promo2.jpg" data-mid="184465431" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c99ffaf27fa8e1c0e6a2d2aa52b9b42e77436cf17b8058e5325cbb040ed74730/collisionpractice_promo2.jpg" /> Photograph by Gabriel Sweet Collision Practice is a live performance work that explores exercises for falling as a collective process for politically tumultuous times. This work contends with socio-economic realities of burnout culture in a moment of political crises and upheaval. We may not all get the luxury of slowing down to mindfully check-in. So, how do we as a community help each other in these moments of intensity? How do we soften the impact of an otherwise tiring and fatigue inducing time? Collision Practice playfully engages the body in a moment of impact to explore possibilities for mutual aid and joy even while under duress Collision Practice was initially curated for an evening of performances by John Birtle at Human Resources in Los Angeles. The piece has since been performed at the LGBT Center, Los Angeles, for the group exhibition a place to stay curated by Pau S. Pescador.&nbsp; https://ryatyezbick.com/growth-lies-pack-of-truth Mon, 26 Sep 2022 23:25:26 +0000 ryatyezbick https://ryatyezbick.com/growth-lies-pack-of-truth growth lies, pack of truth 2022 Premiered at the Queer Binniel in 2022 Exhibited at Craft Contemporary and ReflectSpace&nbsp; <img width="4500" height="3000" width_o="4500" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b0129c8851e13ca736a5868c91bf7d99a745cc7b54ce584485fbc99ae9c9cac0/Ryat-Yezbick_growth-lies.jpg" data-mid="206206288" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/b0129c8851e13ca736a5868c91bf7d99a745cc7b54ce584485fbc99ae9c9cac0/Ryat-Yezbick_growth-lies.jpg" />growth lies, pack of truth is a short speculative film reconfiguring news media coverage of mass shootings from the 1960s to present day. Primarily reworking news footage of the University of Texas tower shooting in 1966, the piece rewrites an interview by a news anchor with a first responder, focusing the conversation instead on the mental health and recovery of the first responder and a mysterious creature spreading like a virus throughout the nation. The film metaphorically combines social anxiety around the rise of pandemics with digital virality as a kind of physical and mental disease rooted in surveillance technologies to examine the commodification of trauma in U.S. news media. growth lies, pack of truth imagine an alternative universe in which vulnerable masculinity may aid in altering the course of the future. <img width="1500" height="2250" width_o="1500" height_o="2250" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3b770b117d8d87fe0afdba9baa9fc80bf83d1ae9131272dd72aac1c161967850/IG-promo_growth-1.jpg" data-mid="206206473" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/3b770b117d8d87fe0afdba9baa9fc80bf83d1ae9131272dd72aac1c161967850/IG-promo_growth-1.jpg" />