"Ideas about what constitutes “Detroit art” often centralize materiality, race, or geography, but Ryan Standfest’s work stands apart from these common points of association to focus on a silent and hugely influential factor in Detroit’s history and current landscape: class, and the aspirational economy of upward mobility." 

—Sarah Rose Sharp, Hyperallergic


"The quandary that we are left with in sorting out Standfest's vision is the ultimate one that we are always left with: what to do with Modernism. Standfest's comic satire of the machine age that left a wake of psychologically and physically maimed humans and a derelict social order was, at the same time, an emancipation from the tyranny of aristocratic ownership of production and design. Standfest engages the Beckettian dilemma with a robustness that propels his excavations while digging for and exposing another ironic gag."

—Glen Mannisto, Detroit Art Review