2024 Gala | Tickets | View All Auction Artworks

Lauren Ruiz: Invader No. 1

DESCRIPTION

Lauren Ruiz, Invader No. 1, 2022, framed- 20 x 24 inches, unframed 16 x 20 inches, digital archival print

Value: $400

Starting Bid: $100

Invader No. 1 confronts notions of nativeness and invasion in the context of land ownership, ecology, and labor. Centering on the inherited erasure of identity and the assimilated image of the immigrant, this work positions the idea of the “invader” as both the white European and the non-white foreigner. By redeploying the conventions of 19th-century portrait photography, the work makes use of the visual iconography of “nativeness” constructed by white Americans during a period of increased immigration and fervent, reactionary nationalism. In doing so, it seeks to undermine the reductive binaries developed to determine and represent the terms of inclusion and acceptability imposed on non-white immigrants to the United States. As part of an ongoing photographic project, this image and the others in its series specifically interrogate how the Eurocentric discourse of the native continues to affect the conditions of possibility for a lived experience of local ecologies available to the generations of non-white, primarily hispanic, immigrants whose relationship to the land rarely involved ownership.

Lauren Ruiz is a research-based multimedia artist creating speculative fiction-based installations, digital works, and multimedia sculptures to question the relationship between the body and the postnatural environment. Her work questions labor, invisibility, and invasion, investigating the connections between her ancestral body and subterranean ecologies. Ruiz has completed residencies at the Santa Fe Art Institute, the Museum of the Southwest and the Women’s International Study Center. Lauren Ruiz has presented her research projects at the Latvian National Museum of Art, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, the 2021 College Art Association Conference, and the 2022 Association for Art History Conference among others. Her work has been exhibited in Japan, Canada, Latvia, the Czech Republic, and Cuba. Lauren Ruiz is based in New York and is represented by Marquee Projects.