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from Fall Undergraduate Exhibition, SAIC Galleries 33 E. Washington St. Chicago, IL.
on view November 7-19th

'ALL WORK' landing page

Use the menu on the left to access each page.Click on an image to enlarge it.For now, each 'work' page is a simple collection of images to enlarge or scroll through. They will be updated when new work is made. More information may be added, so you are free to revisit another time.It is recommended to view any site content on desktop.

unfortunately, the painting page is under construction. Here is a photo of an old painting that no longer exists:

bio

Born in Westchester, Illinois in 2003 with a hand on one’s face and the other holding some sort of complex, Rynn Dziak is a self-proclaimed painter, printer, and wannabe writer based in Chicago, IL. Ostensively, Rynn Dziak is a drawer. In reality, Rynn Dziak is a visual artist? The description cannot be finished because I—yes, I am speaking now—am still studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). The BFA will be received in 2026. I am just asking for some time.

misc. statement

A switch in tone: I am a student, first and foremost. My work varies with a constant urge to say 'but, wait, there's more, I might be doing something else too...' So my spoken statement (I am speaking visually) goes like this: I am a beginner painter, first and foremost. My oil painting practice started in 2025. Painting produces pictures and canvas-objects; if I am to be concerned with 'the image' and how we deal with pictures, then in painting I am producing my own examples. Painting tone: I paint invented scenes filled with symbolic motifs and "characters" from my imagination. Lines of thought and story are disrupted by changes or abstractions in the architecture of the image.The painting is a self-contained world. The print, on the other hand, is a drawing that plays with methodology. Painting: is; Print (as well as other miscellaneous art making): does.I pull from and exist around 'internet-bound' aesthetic cultures of anime and related media. I don't like to situate my pictures in specific times or places. If I reference anything true, then I reference Chicago.I am suspicious of the game of perception and recognition. I am concerned with the frameworks in place that dictate and regard how we see things (how we come to see things) and thus how we make sense of things (to know, to understand, to confirm, to label).I think a lot on topics of certainty, authorship, and the relation of people-to-people (or to things, etc.). These twist the images they surface in, through themes of: absurdity, auto-biography, lies, youth, violence, madness; all albeit cute, albeit clean, albeit 'neutral.' I like to represent the visual experience of the outsider, the observer, the witness: an empty face with eyes wide open; holes for eyes; the sound-proof existence of the solipsist.

explanation

No, I cannot explain it to you, but my work and I—because the work follows the person, apparently, or maybe evidently—exist in an ambivalent zone of self-centered anonymity, of refusing to state all while talking so very much, of pointing and then recoiling, of existing assuredly without any mass or hard placement in the world. Do you know what I mean? There’s a lot of ‘I’ going on without the I’s ever confirmed as a me—and I won’t ever confirm it, because I don’t even know myself, I don’t know it for myself. Fucking hurrah. It isn’t an in-between state. It isn’t like the impossibility of translation, or the inability to enter this or that category; too complex to get pinned down, too nonchalant and mysterious to be grasped. Oh so decadent, so endearing! Love, love, love, love. No, it isn't even all that slippery. It’s not cool enough to be. It’s uncertain, sure, because I’m uncertain, because everything is uncertain. But that level of uncertainty is necessarily under a veil of delusion, and this is the part that cannot be understood. It and I are only uncertain in a manner others aren’t, and it’s hard to make you (you) understand that because you aren’t (you). My work exists in my head. That’s why it doesn’t look the part.

human statement

from 'I, Who Previously Existed as a Book'

There is a thing I am getting at.I am glad and pleasantly surprised, almost proud, that my recent work, which due to my sudden pivot in art making should be seen as the only existence of my work (there is a difference between a due-date and a deadline), transmits its weak, bandaged up visual themes of near-cuteness, near-violence, near-childishness, near-delirium, near-madness. Everything is half-baked, not by way of powerful ambiguity or curiosities. It’s underdeveloped but existent, and left there for quite some time. It’s bandaged at the eye, is what I mean.I’m proud because nothing is bashed in the head until it's drilled downwards into a dull fact of ‘bright colors is childish’ or ‘the juxtaposition of cute and creepy.’ In reality, nothing is any of this, it’s never cute nor violent nor bright because it’s all half-baked. Almost false, but still existent. Mulling, mumbling on, drooling a little, twitching sometimes, but most of the time when you look at it, it’s behaving fairly normally outside of some stutters and the refusal to look you in the eye.I’m glad and satisfied because to have things half-baked means I don’t need to force out a statement when I have nothing to fill one with. Words are solid things, shrouded in the form of an object. By solid I mean that they have a mass. Most words used are empty, but they shouldn’t be, at least in a perfect world. I want to create a utopia of my own. It’s not a utopia because it’s perfect or good, it’s a utopia because it cannot exist and is the only place I can exist. The solipsistic bubble is every man’s first utopia. Utopias can be painful to maneuver, but nothing comes close to the world that exists outside and around it. I’d rather be pricked and prodded by my own made-up problems than have to swim through the physics of the real world. To swim is to swat your arms around in order to advance, a constant act of swatting-away. I am sitting and grabbing and speaking to the false objects I grab. At some point the survival instinct behind swimming disappears from the minds of all the fish and they continue because they can which eventually turns into continuing because they want to.

I’m pleased because by keeping a bandage on my eye I don’t have to see things as much nor do people need to see me as much. As much. Sight is retained to an extent, but always in the context of being bandaged. And sight and recognition and identification of myself is always done by first staring at the bandage, then the other eye, then the bandage.I’m getting at everything I just gave to you. I’m always grabbing my face to console, but I’m also always grabbing my head and slowly spinning and eventually drilling myself downwards in defeat because it can be so frustrating to use words to make sense of things without making any truth. What gets priority is the ability to be read and the ability to seem to be understood. Everything else is secondary because it’s all an impossible problem. These problems are cast aside and ignored instead of being worked on and eventually solved, of course to the extent they can be (and they very much can go far in this regard). This is the part that gets me drilled down.

I’m surprised because everytime I draw a big eye I know what I am doing and I know that everyone knows what I’m doing. But the weird part is that no one ever mentions what I’m doing, no one ever speaks. They engage, they start grabbing the water instead of swatting at it, and their words are all true, just dancing around the central pebble of what I’m offering. They’re able to see but refuse to point out the reasonings and explanations for why everything is the way it is. I mean they do not question or concern themselves with the reasonings. They let it exist. I’m not used to not being questioned. Everything becomes ‘fine’. At the end of the day, I’d rather have fine than anything else. The rest of the day is different. But fine is always good.Opening up on the operating table and recognizing all the organs and bones and grabbing and pulling and fixing them with such gentle care without mentioning a word about why or what any of us surgeons are doing; anesthesia is lovely. It’s really just such a pleasant and fine operation to exist and be let to exist, allowed so much so that recognition and identification and assumptions (the true version of ‘knowing’ and ‘understanding’) does not disrupt anything about it.

What a wonderful thing. We are using words in their full weight without draping them in cloths of mass and form.I mean I’m telling you everything right now. It’s just unfortunate that it’s harder to tell something that is easier to experience. The tricky part is that you cannot experience this while swimming. But oh, my, oh god, it’s just such a lovely thing. ‘Those who understand’ reiterated and bounced off of each other like ping-pong balls until the smallest, most low-life, shrivelled up, twitching groups of bones and sticks can utter the same words. It’s some of the purest metal of an operation that can ever be created, and it tastes great too. That’s why it’s hard to describe in words, because we all have our mouths full. It’s easier to look at, it’s easier to vaguely know, it’s easier to gently smile, it’s easier to squish the liver in a playful manner. Meanwhile, some of us are getting our veins ripped and shredded apart. Gloved hands enter our already-clean bodies and just start swatting until the threads are caught on the shiny, blue fingers. Ripped and shredded in the name of survival. The name of survival only comes up when you force it out of someone. The low-life party is over at this point, the cops have shown up and declared ‘this is a
party.’God, I wish I could wish I was a writer. That way everything would be much simpler by way of being so much more miserable. I’ll explain it like this: if it looks weird to you, how about you check the last person you opened up and shoved your sanitary hands into. A lot more gets deformed than just the outside of a person. But you already know that, ‘everyone knows that.’ Yet here’s the issue: they don’t, and no one is claiming this looks weird! As your eyes glance to the side, as your hands move towards the edge of the paper, as your thumb inserts itself into the dark, cold crevices, think about how in such a natural world of ours, dust appears grey, despite all indications that such a natural thing should be a natural color, and that a natural color cannot be grey because the color charts and paint can labels have taught us that, and ask, to yourself or to someone whom it applies to: what are you so afraid of?

CV      RYNN DZIAK

[email protected]
rynnzk.com
b. 2003 Westchester, IL

EDUCATION

2026      BFA. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.

GROUP EXHIBITION

2025      Fall Undergraduate Exhibition. SAIC Galleries. Chicago, IL.
2025      Class Exhibition. The Gallery at Burren College of Art. Ballyvaughan, Ireland.
2024      My Chicagos: SAIC Students Honor Georgia O’Keeffe. SITE Gallery. Chicago, IL.
2024      Two-Person Display. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.
2023      Tiny Works. Fulton Street Collective. Chicago, IL
2023      Class Exhibition. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.
2023      Art Bash. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.

AWARDS

2025      Edward R. Ryerson Fellowship. School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
2022      Honors Merit Scholarship. School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
2022      Top Scholarship Awards Recipient. Illinois High School Art Exhibition.

RESIDENCY

2025      Burren College of Art. Ballyvaughan, Ireland.

MORE

Pseudo is an ongoing semi-autobiographical writing project to be organized into zine-sized volumes. Diary-style entries record my perspective at the time of writing, yet are twisted or exaggerative in nature; questioning narration, and merging auto-biography with hoax.Pseudo evolves periodically, and when this change occurs, it splits itself up. Each volume takes on a slightly different theme, in its writing style or written content, and is dependent upon my own perspective.Pseudo is something I started in 2023 without knowing it yet.Pseudo is about pseudo, the suffix. Pseudoanalysis is the analysis of ordinary spaces in pointless observation: how to survive as pseudo. Pseudo is highly observant, desperate, an outsider with a need for facts; disappearance of the self in the face of objective reality; inability to join reality (delusion), faked delusion, attempted delusion; an attempt to know objective reality (futile, real), an attempt to record; depersonalized, split self, all-mind, no-extension.Pseudo is a "writing project", a notebook, a transcribed text in the form of a google doc, and not yet printed. One day, it will be printed.This section is a draft and under construction... Return another day.

MORE

One Day I Fell in Reality

This section is under construction... Return another day.

ABOUT

Rynn Dziak (ZK) is a Chicago-based artist and undergraduate student of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), mainly studying painting and printmaking.

3rd Person

Born in Westchester, Illinois in 2003 with one hand on their face and the other holding a slight complex about suburbia, Rynn started attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022 to pursue a BFA in Studio. In this interdisciplinary school, “I will plant one foot down in drawing and see where I can reach” Rynn declared, and so they stepped into architecture, back into drawing, then into printmaking, which really just turns back into drawing, and… Rynn Dziak draws. Rynn Dziak draws when they print, when they paint, when they write, when they draw. Rynn Dziak has realized that prior to SAIC, they never did much other than hold pens dipped in ink and stare ahead, head slightly tilted, slightly dipped.

Written Note

"I grapple, in my art I grapple a lot, I think.No matter at what, I'm always looking up and out; I'm always far away. And I think about why I'm so far, and I try to see if I can reach whatever I'm looking at, which I cannot, and so I respond to it, and in that I create something. The created thing is not there (up and out), but it's not here, either.So I'm always observing. I'm always investigating, but that's because I've always been an investigative person. These are quite crappy investigations, if you were to ask me. Art is as if you were to write a book, and at the end of the day, packed up your things and thought, 'Well, I like how it looks!' There isn't even an answer in the book, I respond, 'It's all up here,' and point to my head which I have locked away. It's incredibly stupid. It is a creation of books, and only that. The point? The point is, I fear, for me to eventually have enough of these incredibly stupid books to then point at, and this point will represent the fact that I had created books, and the fact that I had existed, and that all answers were missed by everyone, because it was locked up here, not there, and I was not there, I never was. And who the hell is watching me point at books?But there really is content, I speak too harshly. Industrial, the machine, the man-made, non-human... Urbanization, the differences in location... The blurring of space, time; what perception means, what visual means, what any aspect of anything ever means. And by 'means,' I mean: how it functions, an operation. I am investigating things after all, I do hold the information. It's there.If creation responds, sometimes a response is petty, it takes a stand, it goes against something. I am too shy to ever say what. I don't die on hills. I have a patch of grass, somewhere.'I am interested in representing nothing, and proving my own existence' is something I had written at some point in time. I used to say, when I was too young to know anything of importance, that my art was information sharing. My work is personal, but I'm not a personal person, which is the point (no finger included); personal by way of first-person (first-person-all). Yet, is all work personal? No, that question isn't real, I didn't ask that. 'Isn't everyone like that...' is just a statement everyone says... Well..."

How to get downtown

330 to BNSF; 330 to UP-W; 317 to Blue line; 322 to Pink line.
554 to MD-W.
You are here.
554 to MD-W.
Red line.

First Person

I am not from an artist family. I was born in Westchester, Illinois and grew up playing baseball and drawing baseball logos. I had very neat handwriting, and I attribute my early ability to draw to the same reason I had neat handwriting. I was always intrigued by ‘the city’ more than anything. And I liked watching the trains pass and I liked riding them, and I liked looking out the window and watching how everything transitions so smoothly from suburb to city to even more city, each architectural decade getting older and older.When I was older I moved to a farther away suburb. I was still ‘good’ at ‘art’ and I was also good at math and other things, and I’m not sure what happened, but at a certain point I felt as if I had been permanently paved into the walls of the art department hallway. They eventually gave me an award for getting paved into the wall, and they gave me plenty of supplies throughout the years. I cannot answer when I decided to take art “seriously.” I told people I’d go into art because I was good at it, which was enough of a reason for anyone who asked. I no longer think I’m good at art.I only ever used pens and I was good at detailed crosshatching and line work. We used oil paint once, which was the first time I had painted, but I didn’t think much of it. I had almost no opinions, save for art history class, where for the first time I felt compelled to get into a heated argument with another person. I realized that during the various instances of having gone to the museum, I picked up a bias towards the modernists.No one really knew, but everyday I’d go home and draw in an ‘anime’ style and post it for the internet to see. And no one ever knew how long I’d been doing this. When I was 10, my cartoons were now live on cable and so I would no longer pause the TV to copy them to paper. When I was 11, I got the computer moved up to my room after my teenage brother decided he’d sleep in the basement. Now I had google at the tips of my fingers, which no longer was a simple picture-oriented encyclopedia, but a world of anime screenshots to copy. Every time I drew these, I would hide the papers in a stack until a day no one was paying attention, and then I’d run out the back door and shove them as deep as I could into the recycling can. I never got them quite deep enough, though.My detest for suburbia only grew wilder and somewhere along the line, perhaps when I got paved into the wall, I grew fond of industrial areas. I’m not sure what I was searching for. If it was for nostalgia, I’d be sleepwalking towards the cemeteries. I guess it is the antithesis of suburbia, what suburbia tries to hide. And maybe I thought I was hidden, so when I entered the wall I finally understood the operation of paving, and all clicked once I went to college. I drew architecturally for the first time and entered a wild world of towers, and once my hand cramped up I went abstract for the first time, but it got much too wild and so I learned printmaking instead. I have multiple recycling bins now and I’m not sure what to do with them, but I’ll find my way.

Factual Description

5 foot 8.
Good vision.
Exists in black and white.
Pronounced like Rin JyAAKUncertain.

ABOUT

Rynn Dziak
[email protected]
rynnzk.com
b. 2003 Westchester, IL.EDUCATION
2026. BFA. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.GROUP EXHIBITION
2025. Class Exhibition. Burren College of Art. Ballyvaughan, Ireland.
2024. My Chicagos: SAIC Students Honor Georgia O’Keeffe. SITE Gallery. Chicago, IL.
2024. Two-Person Display. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.
2023. Tiny Works. Fulton Street Collective. Chicago, IL
2023. Class Exhibition. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.
2023. Art Bash. School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago, IL.AWARDS
2025. Edward R. Ryerson Fellowship. School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
2022. Honors Merit Scholarship. School of the Art Institute of Chicago.RESIDENCY
2025. Burren College of Art. Ballyvaughan, Ireland.PRE-COLLEGE WORK
2022. Illinois High School Art Exhibition: Senior Scholarship Exhibition. Bridgeport Art Center. Chicago, IL.
2022, 2021, 2020, 2019. Annual Harper Area High School Art Show. Harper College. Palatine, IL.
2020, 2019. Illinois High School Art Exhibition: Northern Regional Art Exhibition. Bridgeport Art Center. Chicago, IL.2022. Department Award (representing Art). Schaumburg High School.
2022. Top Scholarship Awards Recipient. Illinois High School Art Exhibition.

ABOUT

Hello.

My name is Rynn Dziak.

I am an undergraduate student at the
School of the Art Institute of Chicago, primarily studying painting, drawing, and printmaking.

This portfolio is organized to show the breadth of my visual-art making experience.

Printmedia

Hard Skills: lithography, etching, bookmakingPrintmaking has taught me the importance of careful work in a meticulous, slow, and aging medium; where fine-art combines with reproduction and cleanliness of the graphic.

Drawing/Painting

Hard Skills: architectural drawing, illustration, oil painting

Design/Layout

Hard Skills: book formatting, comics, basic graphic design

Video

Hard Skills: 2D animation (frame, tweening), motion graphics, basic video editing

Social Media
Experience

Remaining separated from my fine-art practice, I have been posting online content and maintaining an audience since 2016; mostly anime-style illustrations on Instagram.Over these years, I've grown familiar to adapting content to the ever-changing nature of social media platforms; some formats I've explored are posts, stories, 'behind the scenes' content, youtube videos, short form content (reels, TikTok), memes, and community spaces (Discord). I have also utilized this platform to conduct or participate in collaborative events, and run a commission side-gig.

I've maintained engagement by double-posting content in relevant formats, such as an Instagram reel 'speedpaint.'The analytics comparison between a successful post and reel can be seen on the left, alongside the reel itself.

I also have experience incorporating higher-quality editing or animation into short form content. Combining this uptick in quality with timely memes, trends, or popular topics have garnered some of my highest enagement.The respective analytics are as follows:

I am most confident in After Effects video editing, where I still create personal mockups such as this lyric video.

Thank you for your time.

This portfolio has been updated and specifically catered for its current application.