GABRIELA RUIZ

Ruiz’s multimedia artistic practice is concerned with identity, the body, desire, and self-fashioning. Her oeuvre encompasses a variety of mediums from performance and video to sculptured paintings. Ruiz’s familiarity with construction work influences her use of accessible materials found in hardware stores and allows her to think about art structurally. The artist makes use of everyday objects as well as indestructible, industrial, and often toxic materials such as insulating and expandable foam, resin, plastic, and wood, to name a few.

As in all of Ruiz’s projects, Futurition is an invitation for viewers to look inside of the artist’s self-described chaotic thought process. As physical manifestations of her consciousness, the sculptural paintings, video projections, and soundscapes are an exercise in reconnecting body and mind. The multi-channel video installations project video collages of self-shot material including fragmented images of the artist’s body. The montage of body parts reflects her feeling of disconnection from the physical form and serves as a tool for Ruiz to see herself from a third-person perspective.

Two sculptural paintings feature her signature masses of foam, plastic moulds of the artist’s face, and textural designs developed with a three-dimensional pen. While one painting is presented on a typical picture window wood panel, the other takes on an amorphous form. Two disparate sounds at opposite ends of the gallery space provide the soundtrack to Futurition, the centrepiece of which is a sculpture that serves as an incubator. Whether the incubation period is fruitful or results in destruction is up for debate.

Preoccupied with phobias, hypochondria, impending doom, and apocalypse for as long as she could remember, Ruiz arrived at the uncomfortable term ‘futurition’ from a place of hopelessness. Futurition, meaning assurance of the future or a future existence, is a concept that Ruiz is uncertain of and wants to believe in. Viewing humankind as precarious and her corporeal self as fragile and decomposing, the artist’s use of industrial and indestructible materials to mould her body is not only an attempt to reconnect with it, but also to ensure its preservation.

Gabriela Ruiz (b. 1991, Los Angeles, CA) is a self-taught artist born and raised in the San Fernando Valley to working-class Mexican immigrants. Her practice blends diverse forms of expression and media, including sculpture, video, painting, performance, and design. She has had solo exhibitions at LaPau Gallery, Los Angeles (2021), The Vincent Prize Art Museum, Los Angeles, (2019), and The Little Tokyo Art Complex, Los Angeles (2017). Ruiz has participated in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2021); Museo de las Artes, Guadalajara (2019); CASTTL and Memm an de Stroom, Antwerp (2019); ONE Gallery, Los Angeles (2019); ltd los angeles, Los Angeles (2019); Centro de las Artes, Monterrey (2018); Centro Cultural Clavijero, Morelia (2018); Museo de Arte, Mexico City (2018); ICA Los Angeles, Los Angeles (2018); and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2018).