User:Valeriac2022/Gabriela Ruiz

[Gabriela Ruiz] (b.1991) is a multimedia and performance artist. She is well known for her installations, as well as her clothing line, Leather Papi. Her work is very centered around her experiences and identity as a queer Latina/x; she is also a huge advocate for sex posivity and body positivity. (1)A lot of her work is inspired by kink and queer culture.

Biography (or Early Life and Education) Gabriela Ruiz was born in 1991 and was raised in the San Fernando Valley. She went to Ulysses S. Grant High School in Van Nuys, and doesn’t have a formal educational background, she took a few courses in community college for fashion design and fine art, but never completed anything. (5)

Art (or Notable Works or Selected Works. Also Exhibitions, Projects, Collections) Haus was a multimedia installation solo art show with sculpture, video, and a party by Gabriela. (2)Haus is an installation of 4 monochromatic rooms in red, yellow, green,pink, and blue(1). Ruiz connects the intimacy of home with this work because her art is something that is very intimate to her as a creator. She sets up these rooms to each represent a different kind of mood. These rooms contain recycled household items and furniture which she then covered with insulation foam and glossy colors.The sculptures become blurred visions (1) of normal household items. By doing this, Ruiz brings to life her deepest desire to have a home of her own. Ruiz grew up in a two-bedroom house and seven people, she didn’t have privacy. Her work is a reflection of everything she wanted and didn’t have. In an interview with Samantha Helou Hernandez of KCET earlier this year, Ruiz talks about how home is a huge source of inspiration for her art. According to Hernandez, “her performance, installation and video converge to create a home of the artist’s choosing, a home where religion is questioned, sexual freedom is celebrated and the typical elements that make up a home are distorted and given a new life—a more interesting life of energetic color and bulbous foam that is at once disturbing and reassuring in its monochrome serenity” (Hernandez 2019).(4) Gabriela Ruiz: Full of Tears is the first solo museum exhibition of Gabriela Ruiz, (Leather Papi) Ruiz uses 3-D rendering, video mapping, and installation to explore the mechanics of memory in relation to technology and emotion. For this exhibition, Ruiz creates a digital self-portrait in an immersive gallery space incorporating sound and color.(3) Ruiz’s Full of Tears exhibition is painted a bright, neon-lime green. On one wall various red doors are mounted at various angles. One article describes this piece: “Each one is made to look as if it’s open by way of red strips of wood mounted to the neon green gallery wall to form doorways. Each door is decorated differently but they share the use of geometrically shaped mirrors, artificial plant stems, and doorknobs and locks arranged in the style of faces. Just below the mirror there are two door locks—the part of a chain door lock that attaches to the door itself—arranged to look like eyebrows; below the makeshift eyebrows are two doorknobs side by side to form ‘eyes’. Completing the face is a sideways smile, spray-painted directly onto the door in a highlighter yellow color. Other doors have different arrangements but generally give off the same unique aesthetic. Within the ‘doorways’ are video projections flashing between both digital and real faces, including the face of the artist, and then melting into what can best be described as blobs or swirls of graphically designed liquids. This section of the exhibit gives the viewer the impression of being in a house one would only come across in a bizarre dream; it is equal parts mesmerizing and unsettling.” (4) Leather Papi (Brand) Leather Papi isn’t mass produced. As an artist, Ruiz makes every piece to be one of a kind and different. She screen prints everything by hand. (5) Her brand also promotes gender neutrality in its design. Leather Papi is a reflection of Ruiz’s passion for not only art itself, but her desire to give space to work that isn’t traditional; art that doesn’t follow western conventions.

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