Alan Ruiz

09.06.08 - 09.28.08
Ground Control
Site-Specific Installation
art.yale.edu/alanruiz

Translating geometric abstraction into ticking bursts of stroboscopic light, Alan Ruiz uses the morphology of Minimalism to distill what began as a self-reflexive investigation of painting as object into its constituent elements: light, heat, force " in other words, pure transmission beaming, bounding and cascading off the reflective walls of a mirrored control room, thus collapsing two realities, the virtual and the Real.

Light straddles the boundary between particle, energy and waveform. Here, the physical act of painting is removed. Context collapses. Non-space, virtuality " at what point does the virtual end and the Real begin? Does synthetic experience ever replicate reality?

Taking the immersive experience of a Barnett Newman, of standing before a painting larger than human-scale, combining it with the peculiar atmosphere of non-place buzzing through airports, casinos and discotheques, Ruiz creates an experience that is both immersive and self-conscious, centered on and abstracted off from the core of architectural consciousness, the human scale.

Ruiz uses this scale to create a social architecture where these ideas are brought into play. Rooms within a room, a bank of strobes mounted on a gloss black and reflexive silver board. Within the control room the viewer is forced to monitor the exterior chamber via a camera that surveys the room, digitally projecting it on the adjacent wall of the gallery, while the pulses of light periodically annihilate it all, forcing attention on the sinuosity between the Real and virtuality.

Surveillance, gaze and the panopticon are all evident in this installation, while still retaining the resonance of mass media, consumer history: the contemporary collective unconsciousness and the darkness, greed and destruction lurking at its periphery.