Artist Talk: Friday, June 7 at 5:30pm
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 6 – 8pm
Exhibition Runs: June 7 – July 25, 2019
There are tourist traps along the roadside – tacky oases breaking up the monotony between long stretches of highway. These pit stops and rest areas embody the character of the land on which they sit and serve as monuments to the adventures they interrupt. Ruby Troup moved to Santa Fe sight unseen, and has felt like a perpetual tourist ever since. Drawing from a specific personal narrative, Troup uses an intuitive, additive method of construction to create forms that echo the Southwest landscape, atomic age design, and highway kitsch.
In her exhibition, Point of Interest, Troup creates symbolic landmarks as a kind of map, charting the last few years of her life in the high desert. Abstracted from symbols that have a common cultural connotation, these landmarks evoke a sense of a shared experience and invite viewers to consider what they have discovered in their own travels.
Ruby Troup received the SURFACE 2018 Harwood Art Center Solo Exhibition Award, presented annually for artistic excellence, originality of vision and dedication to practice.
About Ruby
Ruby Troup uses wood to create highly narrative work based on her formative years and on the environments in which she has lived. Her forms are evocative of the body, landscape, and vernacular architecture. Often using reclaimed materials and a wide variety of surface treatments, Troup explores ideas of transformative growth, recollection, place, and home. Ruby lives and works in northern New Mexico and holds a BFA from the Herron School of Art and Design and a MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. rubytroup.com
“My work is autobiographical, and I think of it as being a collection of short stories. Using wood fabrication and adornment, I have developed a three-dimensional language to document my personal narrative. My most recent body of work examines how place becomes intertwined with memory and how a particular location becomes a monument to the experiences lived there. I am exploring the process of turning unfamiliar spaces into known, internalized, records of events.”
– Ruby Troup