All Exhibitions

Focal Point by Donna Ruff

Sep 15–Jan 14, 2024

The Space

From the Artist on this body of work,

"My grandparents owned a scrap paper company in Chicago. Field Publications, the publishers of World Book and Childcraft Encyclopedias, would sell old books as scrap by weight; but they would first slash each page, top to almost bottom, so that the books could not be resold. My grandmother would tape each page together and give the books to my sister and me. This made for a somewhat disjointed, not to mention sticky, reading experience.

I have always been intrigued by the idea of coded messages. For years I wrote in a journal every day, but I never wanted anyone to be able to read it, so I started tearing out the pages, gluing them to canvas or paper, and painting over them. A viewer could look closely and catch glimpses of a recollected story, but the pieces were disjointed, and the narrative could only be rebuilt in a way that was entirely conjectural. However, often the shreds of text left revealed were figuratively revealing as well. This idea continues to permeate my work in various forms.

In recent years, I’ve been obsessed with the news. I’ve subscribed to the print edition of the New York Times for 40 years and have a sentimental attachment to it at this point. I feel dismay at the disappearance of news in print. The most widely known and collected work of mine is a series of the front pages of newspapers, cut into patterns that suggest art and architecture of the Middle East, and featuring front-page stories about the plight of migrants around the world. The patterns create a play of positive and negative space and allow just enough content to remain so that a story can be recognized. These also function as an archive of times past as the news cycle races forward. I was fortunate to be given a copy of the last print edition of the London Independent, which is included in this exhibition.

The newspaper as an object, both conceptually and materially, continues to be a source of interest for me. The photo-collages in this exhibition are made from photographs of the newspaper itself. Instead of cutting away content, the text and images are affected by light and depth of field, creating abstract shapes that again hold history and narrative in a duality of obscurity and clarity.

I do volunteer work in my community and am involved with some social justice movements. During the pandemic, when I couldn’t work in my studio, I was cleaning out drawers and came upon some t-shirts from marches and political actions. I didn’t want to throw them away, but I wasn’t going to wear them again, so I had the idea of creating an elegiac archive of past protests. After cutting the shirts into loopy patterns I dipped them in plaster, and arranged them on the wall. They reminded me of makeshift memorials people create on highways and bicycles, so-called ghost bikes. I decided to lean into this idea and decorated the shirts with artificial flowers. Friends contributed their own t-shirts, and it became a collaborative work.

When something is removed, it can be a relief, or it can be a loss. It brings our attention to what remains. I want to create a new story from those remaining bits and pieces and focus our attention on how that past has informed the present."

- Donna Ruff

Learn more about the artist and read her bio here.

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