Ryan Cullen's practice synthesizes philosophical and psychological histories. Cullen does this to examine how and why new images are made during historical moments when systems seem to be collapsing. The artist’s work explores the brutal genealogies of societal destruction, depicting ecstatic Protestant Puritans, vivisections of domestic furniture and prophetic mess fetishists. Cullen's work employs the painted image as a means to make visible both ideologies and their histories—simultaneously building and analyzing networks of images that explore hegemonic decline.