Thanks
Hi, and welcome. Many thanks for being here this afternoon to our first “Meet The Artist” Series at The Visions Gallery in Cafelix. We want to thank Cafelix (Felix) for allowing us to use the Café for this series.
Growing Up
I would like to tell you just a little bit about myself (I will certainly try not to bore you).
As many of you know I was born in Mexico City, my Mom was Cuban from Havana and my Dad Mexican from a small mining town in Zacatecas called Fresnillo. So my upbringing was in a totally “full of drama” household, where lots of emotion was displayed for any reason on a daily basis, but I also grew up enjoying the rich colors of Mexico, latin music, and attending 18 years of Catholic School. All this set in pretty deeply in the fiber of my life.
Discovery of Art World
I discovered the world of Art when I was recuperating from an accident and was spending two months at home. One of my Mom’s friends came by to visit and brought me a present. This present was spectacular for me “ a nine year old” bored to tears with my leg in a cast and stuck in bed. The gift was a 5 drawer set of colored pencils. It had every color imaginable. Like Charlie Brown’s Peanuts used to say “It was happiness for me”. The next 60 days I spent forgetting about my leg and drawing and coloring endlessly.
College
Moving ahead about 9 more years I was looking for colleges to study Art. But my Dad, a very pragmatic lawyer, did not think that much of Art for Art’s sake, so he suggested I studied Graphic Design, which might enable me to make a little money as an adult. And so I did. I started my studies at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. But I wasn’t completely happy so looked to further my design studies in the States. I was accepted at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles, and off I went.
Met George
Third day in school I met George, my husband of 35 years...
Mexico city 5 years – US 27 years…
A few years later we were married in Mexico City and spent a 5 year period there. However life and work opportunities brought us back to the US and we settled for 27 years in the NY/CT area.
Turning point… the year 2000
In the year 2000, I made a serious decision, coincidentally after spending time with my Dad who was failing. And gave up my corporate job in order to free myself to dedicate my time to making art. I rented a great old studio with big white walls and started a period of self-exploration and tried several mediums.
Photography/Writing/Psychology
Photography was one of the areas I explored, asked all my friends to pose for me. Also worked with gesso and clay. I also started to write and document my feelings and my days. I slowly started to realize that what I was feeling was the need to express my memories, thoughts or events that touched my heart. I wanted to connect to people through my art. This could also give me the opportunity to make a statement regarding politics, or social justice.
While I was helping take care of my Dad in Puerto Vallarta where he lived, I paced the beach morning and evenings and started to get fascinated with the footmarks on the sand. They were so different, some had Nike imprints, some huarache, some barefoot, some dog feet, all sizes, all different. Every day there were new fresh imprints and by the end of the day they were taken out by the tides. I realized how well that related to our presence in earth. To the cycle of life and death. How some of us make some kind of imprint, some a heavy strong one, some a subtle one…but in the end they ALL get washed out by the tide. I took about 350 photographs and created my first installation called “Leaving Our Mark”… (Click for link to installation details) I actually built a sand box, and although it was the middle of winter with snow on the streets, I had people come into the gallery and take their boots off just to make and imprint on the sand.
The nature of my Art Work was to be Conceptual.
At this time most of my pieces were 2 dimensional. Combination of writing and photography.
I did a piece in memory and honor of my Mother and the 3650 handwritten letters she wrote me in ten years. I have them all by the way…
The work started to take a certain style of “storytelling” and I always used collage and layering to tell my story. There were items in my memory bank that I wanted to hold in time, to immortalize. My baby chair, the white shoes I used to have to wear to Church every Sunday. And many other things.
Identity and viewed from a female point of view
Why we are who we are?
Later on I started to work on the subject of “identity” and the “female”. …. which by the way I am not done with YET. A friend told me…You have to work to a subject until there is no more to learn from it….
It was an important theme for me as an adult living in the US. You have to understand that I was living as a woman in a foreign country now on a full-time basis, and really trying hard to immerse myself in the American culture & community. Working in NYC is a challenge for anybody but for a Mexican girl, that had no clue and for instance went out to buy a bright purple coat to go to work, instead of the “classic black uniform”. And was looked at like “What were you thinking, who is this woman anyway?
It was interesting to me to observe how many things we give up in order to immerse yourself into another culture.
3 Dimensional Work/Objects
My work was starting to take shape, but I wanted more depth to the work, so started to introduce 3D shapes into my work. I made 3-D Gesso female figures, hands made out of resin, introduced objects, shoes, wood, glass, found metal scraps into the work. The objects really helped me “tell the story”.
I always loved Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell and how they used objects and placed them in a completely foreign setting. I loved doing that.
I started to make it my life to take trips to the dump, to the metal salvage place, or pick up objects on my walks. Always collecting what for many was “trash”. But it gave me joy in some way to take an unused or discarded piece of something and give it “life” again.
I grew up in a country were we did not throw something away until it was totally ususable. I remember having out toaster for ten years. We took it to have this or that replaced and it was back in order. Now a days, you just go buy another one and toss the other one out. So the subject of recycling something is sweet to me.
Process
In term of process, people ask me what goes first the concept or the object?
Well I usually like to explore a subject for a while. To have a theme and to end up with a Series of one kind or another.
For instance I had an exhibition I was preparing for and I knew the space was very large. So I thought about working with doors as my substrate. A friend of mine luckily was about to level her house and I asked her if I could come and take all the old doors and windows. Which I did… with the help of my husband. Then I thought of the metaphor of a Gateway or a Pathway. How many times a day do we go through doors in and out of rooms. Open and close windows, the worlds inside and outside of those windows. Big theme to explore. Then I decided that the photography that I would use for these pieces would be of nature. Precisely because nature has no walls, doors or windows, yet we as humans organize the woods, we create trails for us to get through, create a place to rest under the shade of a big tree. We pass through natural gateways of canyons, or mountains from one place to the other. So I asked one of my friends to come with me to the country and pose for me in this beautiful quarry, where rocks formed natural pathways. Later I incorporated the photos inside the doors and covered with wax (encaustic), carved thoughts and poems. At a flea market I found some old metal raised numbers that did a beautiful job identifying each of the pieces in this series.
So in this example the object came before the theme.
Other times it is the theme or concept that comes first.
ENCAUSTIC has become my medium of choice
Encaustic is basically wax with resin. Wax was used since years ago by the Greeks to protect their large vases and their works of art. Now a days they add resin to the wax to give it more pliability and so it will not crack with time or temperature changes.
JASPER JOHNS used encaustic on his paintings, remember for instance the flags and stars.
For me it is a wonderful medium that allows me to encase my photos, objects in layers.
So I can keep adding information in areas, and you can actually see through the transparency of the layer. I will talk more about encaustic as I show you some work.
There seems to be interest so I will probably teach and “encaustic workshop” at the end of the year.
FAST FORWARD TO NOW, free thinking has come with me as I arrived in Todos Santos two years ago. Back home again. Need to re-immerse myself in my own culture.
How to apply my process here?. It was a challenge since George and I moved here with only what we could bring in our station wagon. A few books, tools and art materials… totally different from the city where I grew up and the ones I had been living at.
But I definitively responded to my new environment. We arrived in the month of May and the desert was all brown. All the Torotes and the Cardones were brown, covered with dust and I could not figure out if they were dead or alive. So I started to carry my camera and photograph them on my walks. Later I created high contrast photos with them. And, for my first pieces here I decided to try and make some photo transfers into wax. The process was time consuming and I was able to add more drawing or texture to the pieces as I went along.
Wax has a lot of properties and it can be applied ultra smooth or with lots of texture. In this case I wanted it to be fairly smooth. It really depends on the application with a brush and the work done with a heat gun to melt the wax with the previous layer.
The first 12 months in Todos Santos I took a lot of photographs of nature, people, dogs, and picked up tons of items off the street with an idea of incorporating them into a piece of art. At the time we were renting a house and I liked working on the balcony of the house.
It was pretty breezy and fresh, I could get a glance of the ocean and did not need a fan to clear the fumes from my wax. I had an occasional fly land on the work but it was fine…
These are some examples of how I did. As I mentioned before I love taking an object and using it out of context.
One year later, we finished our house, my studio is still “Au Plein Air”
And I started work on some larger pieces that we could hang on our new house.
The orange piece hanging inside in the gallery with the keys hanging from it is an example. Used bobwire from our constuction site and old keys which I had done a lot of work with and these were the last ones I had. The piece is called “The keys to the Heart”. The heart is a symbol that I used often in my work. It goes back to being a very Mexican symbol used in the Milagros on the churches for generations.
I also used the theme of the desert and used part of our Xmas tree and construction mesh from our foam panels in it, did another one with the ocean theme, a Todos Santos theme, an Identity piece using photography and encaustic.
Website www.ruenitz.com CARDS
Helen Wurlitzer Foundation
Last year I was invited through an artist fellowship of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation to spend two and a half months in one of their houses in Taos New Mexico. It was again an opportunity to react to a different environment and create art. It was a period of great revelation for me and created a series called “The Feminine” which I will be showing March 12-26 at Galeria On-cé, down the street in Hidalgo and Militar. The opening will be March 12th 2-5.
I want to thank you for your time and will be happy to answer any questions you might have at this time.
Questions???????????????????
