Home is you, right now

RUBY/DAKOTA is excited to announce Home is You, Right Now, a debut group exhibition of multi-disciplinary and multi-generational 21st century artists in conjunction with its opening day.

Inspired by the gallerist’s inner journey home – objectified as the image of an empty house – this collection of artworks speak to the double-sided nature of our conscious and unconscious drives that pull us toward homecoming, the body’s impulse to replay the past over and over, and the murky temporal space we all inhabit between childhood and adulthood.

Perhaps it is you, hidden inside the epidermic layers of tissue over thick Bristol paper, draped across your girlfriend’s body, all skin and also nothing, like pareidolia in the clouds. Youth always tries to find its shape. A self-portrait is always a map to the past, as if you had a choice to go back. As if staring into that gaping fish’s mouth, all toothless and gummy, in the nightmare you are just awakening from, startled and exhausted, offered you a portal.

 Intricate, solitary, obsessive motions of string entanglements juxtapose sensual, romantic strokes in paintings steeped in vibrant color and unconscious desire, creating a haziness where what’s invisible might be more affective in your body than what’s visible, offering a language of sensation with an uncannily familiar quality.

 With works hung like relics of a deemed-deranged teenage girl’s bedroom aligned in a gridlike formation, mimicking a white picket fence, Ruby/Dakota transforms itself structurally into a blatant symbol of middle-class American safety, an illusory, paradoxically romantic and deadening dream of home, located somewhere between aberration, fine art and fallacy.

 Within distorted scales and exposed intimacy at various levels of subject matter, language and process, this collection asks us to look closely at ourselves beneath the veils of our projected selves in our memory-films playing on repeat. Does you refer to Self or Other, and what happens in that parallax view between either/or? Where is home, if not in the physical object, and what is the cost of living in and for another’s organism, even at the risk of our own disappearance? The answer, the show offers, might have something to do with love.

—Rachel Nagelberg

Please join us at the gallery Friday, September 6 for a closing reception, 6-8PM