Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum Founded by Larry Aldrich in 1964, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum is dedicated to fostering the work of innovative artists whose ideas and interpretations of the world around us serve as a platform to encourage creative thinking. It is the only museum in Connecticut devoted to contemporary art, and throughout its fifty-year history has engaged its community with thoughtprovoking exhibitions and education programs. Board of Trustees Eric G. Diefenbach, Chairman; Linda M. Dugan, Vice-Chairman; William Burback, Treasurer/ Secretary; Diana Bowes; Chris Doyle; Annabelle K. Garrett; Georganne Aldrich Heller, Honorary Trustee; Michael Joo; Neil Marcus; Kathleen O’Grady; Lori L. Ordover; Martin Sosnoff, Trustee Emeritus; John Tremaine
Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval Curated by Amy Smith-Stewart
November, 15, 2015, through April 3, 2016 The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum The Aldrich, in addition to significant support from its Board of Trustees, receives contributions from many dedicated friends and patrons. Major funding for Museum programs and operations has been provided by the Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Office of the Arts; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Foundation; the Leir Charitable Foundations; The Goldstone Family Foundation; the Anne S. Richardson Fund; and Fairfield Fine Art.
Alyson Baker, Executive Director Larry Aldrich (1906–2001), Founder
Generous support for Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval is provided by The Coby Foundation, Valerie and Greg Jensen, Andrew Kreps Gallery, and Patrons Circle contributor Lisa Ivorian-Jones. ISBN 978-0-692-55589-7
258 Main Street Ridgefield, CT 06877 203.438.4519 aldrichart.org
Ruth Root: Old, Odd, and Oval
Untitled, 2015. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
Old, Odd, and Oval: A Reading You know, all the work I ever made is always in each new piece. And all the work I ever saw too, I can see now, is contained in each piece. – Mary Heilmann1
Old, Odd, and Oval. The title, chosen by Ruth Root, perfectly sums up where her practice has been and where it might be heading. As the artist always chooses “untitled” for her individual pieces, the show’s dubbing is revelatory as it imbues the works on view with metaphorical meaning. • Old—Root’s twenty-year career hinges on an existential quest to find her “place” in a centuries-old tradition. Along the way, Root has forged her own “canon,” an abstract language she has been steadily advancing. • Odd—a descriptive label that tags the works stylistically as an inebriating blend of the eccentric and offbeat. • Oval—none of the work from 2000 onwards has ever been equal-sided or symmetrical, with Root preferring the elliptical, lopsided, and fluky. Root’s practice centers on an intensive investigation of color, pattern, form, material, and support. For more than two decades, she has wrestled within the discourse of abstract painting, exploring the tangible and illusory boundary of reduction and representation, wall and object, foreground and background, even inventing her own color wheel to challenge canonized color theory. Old, Odd, and Oval is Ruth Root’s solo US museum debut, focusing on her most recent body of work—medium-to-large to site-engaged paintings. These demonstrate her latest experimentations with new materials and fabrication methods, as she combines hand-applied enamel and spray-painted plexiglass with pulsating fabrics she designs digitally online. These new works forge optical plays that confuse and delight as they disrupt guarded demarcations about painting and support. Alongside this new work is an intimate installation of Root’s works on paper, made over a six-year period, 1998 to 2003, that reveal an advancing investigation of pattern, texture, and shape, all noted influencers of what was to come (evidenced by the new work on view). Root’s painted-paper collages feature geometric compositions with quirky cartoonish elements to rupture color fields—madcap flourishes that humanize pure
Untitled, 2001. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
abstraction. Together, they confirm Root’s ongoing commitment to creating work that advances and expands upon the contested yet generative breakdowns and buildups of Abstract Expressionism—in particular the Color Field painters—and its later successors, Minimalism and feminism, using a heady mix of homespun humor, technical ingenuity, and unparalleled craftsmanship to generate a painting for the twenty-first century. Shortly after completing graduate school at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993, and immediately following her summer residency at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1994, glimpses of what would become Root’s mature work started to surface. In 1995, Root made a series of small paintings, Eat or Be Eaten Painting/Not Painting, for a group exhibition at the Anderson Gallery in Buffalo. Upon 24 x 24 and 24 x 36 inch canvases, with surfaces that mimicked craft paper, materialized fragments of conversations orbiting inside Root’s head about her and us. Slang, jest, labels and insults—like “Biggest Sucker This Side of Hell,” “Biggest Sucker in the City,” “Deluxe Queen Creep,” “Fine With Me,”—were interwoven in hairy Cousin Itt lookalikes, shaggy heads and woolly bodies, endless permutations of the artist’s self. 2 In one work, Root spells out FUSS in all capitals with a large Y outlining a bushy female pubis, reading: “Why so fussy?” The furry females of the Eat or Be Eaten series evolved into the Migraine Headaches paintings of 1997. There, the hairballs sprout scrawny legs and shifty eyes. A year later, Root unleashed another zany personification: teeny smoking cigarettes turn up, nestled inside teetering towers of Tetris blocks, anthropomorphizing an exclusively geometric composition. Like a smoking gun, the artist is caught “in the act,” taking time out to reflect— her “abstract expressions” poking fun at her male predecessors’ cocky pretensions. Root felt
Untitled, 2003. Collection of the artist
she was “...taking a break to think about painting—a feminist reaction to all the macho Abstract Expressionists standing back, looking at their paintings, contemplating their next move.”3 This is most evident in paintings from 1999, where, for example, two fields of color, muddy orange and dirty lilac, come together, a comic mouth with a cigarette butt dangling from its expressive “lips” rupturing a Barnett Newman zip. The cigarettes are soon replaced by drifting eyeballs in 2000 to 2001; without a doubt they are the artist’s own, swimming in vibrant monochromes or dizzying patchworks of stacking hues, staring back at us sideways or cockeyed, their yo-yoing pupils deflecting our gaze. From 1998 to 2003, Root made head-scale oil-on-paper collages as a byproduct of the eyeball and cigarette paintings on canvas, in order to use up whatever remaining oil paint was left at the end of each studio workday. Hundreds of works on paper were made during this period, and unlike studies or preparatory drawings, the paintings predate the works on paper. The structure of the painted paper pieces was not predetermined by the traditional square or rectilinear format of the canvas; the works organically resolved themselves when the elements were brought together, like Matisse’s paper cutouts, as Root choreographed her compositions from bits and pieces. Their soft contours, sloped, curved, and triangular corners give them the appearance of futuristic dwellings, channeling Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier, and perhaps even deep-sea submersibles. Wobbly arrays of wonky squares resemble windows, touting sometimes-hidden interiors wallpapered with stars and stripes or cutouts showing empty space. These works were hung directly onto the wall in stimulating groupings. The smooth angles and aberrant shapes of the works on paper broadcast Root’s next direction. Turning to earlier precursors like Ellsworth Kelly, Root began painting directly onto
ultrathin aluminum panels in 2003. This enabled her to cut out forms with a jigsaw and execute glossy chromatic planes that looked like vinyl stickers or desktop icons; although the panels were well sanded, up close subtle traces of surface imperfections were revealed, asserting that they were made by hand. It was during this period that Root developed a “‘skewed color wheel’ based on secondary and tertiary colors (brown and pink being opposites, rather than blue and orange) and eliminating the primary color blue altogether.”4 Thereby, her color palette was dominated by rich plums, poppy and peony pinks, nutty browns, rusty reds, fleshy tans, key lime yellows, sherbet greens, felt greys, lush lavenders, and violets. In order for these super-flat, ultra-slim works to appear flush with the wall, Root retrofitted each with a specially made aluminum cleat, a work of art in its own right. Over time, as the paintings grew in scale, they appeared to almost retreat into the wall. As they progressed, some of the discernible bumps that protruded from their surfaces became more prominent; coated in a stark white, they hinted to an imaginable pliability. These fantasy “folds” signaled where the artist was heading. As Root’s large aluminum works came to an end, in 2008 to 2009, she entered a period of research and reflection. While finalizing a large body of work for a solo exhibition at the Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York in 2008, she drafted the show’s press release. Instead of a descriptive statement about the works on view, she offered up a daisy chain of images, a shout-out to the diverse range of her inspiration, drawing from high and low visual culture— from off-color bathmats to Gordon Matta-Clark’s dynamic cuts to Lynda Benglis’s rainbow spills to eighteenth-century portrait silhouettes to the dyed and cut canvases of Richard Tuttle, and so on.5 She also began to imagine the paintings shrinking in size. Interestingly, this was already happening in a sense, as she started to compose bookmarks from scraps of odds and ends found in a drawer in her studio. She used the bookmarks to spot influential works found in “around eighty books.”6 It was an occasion to “put my work in context, gather references... it was as if these huge monumental paintings became smaller and elongated, functional and bookmarking other things that I wanted to think about or incorporate into my work.”7 This was her restart button, resulting in many works on paper that were never shown—although the bookmarks did find their way out into the world, as gifts to friends and colleagues. The original bookmarks were collaged together and populated books in her studio, but shortly thereafter she began to produce them on the computer to accommodate tabletop-scale catalogues and monographs. Like her paintings, they sported tabs and oversized appendages, so they’d stick out of the books’ sides and edges. Root was excited to conceive something functional, that looked a lot like a painting, but was to be placed inside another object, a free and easy take-away that was inherently interactive. It was during this period that Root also began to experiment with other materials, such as customized fabrics. In 2003, during a visit to the Whitney Museum, she saw The Quilts of Gee’s Bend and was “drawn to how much they looked like modern abstract paintings, abstract paintings made functional, the bed being another place to display a painting.” 8 In 2011, for an exhibition at The Suburban in Chicago, Root unveiled two small paintings, indicators of her latest experimentations. Peculiarly shaped with quirky, awkward features— channeling the bookmarks, but blowing them up to torso scale—they set the course for where she would move next.
Untitled, 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
It was a residency at Dartmouth College in 2014 that really propelled Root forward. The Dartmouth works, she explains, “started as an inversion of the canvas and stretcher, the canvas being both the fabric part, which holds the painted part, but then the whole thing, that then operates as a painting.” 9 They comprised two components: a seamless fabric element with punched in grommets that allows the work to be attached level to the wall, and the handpainted plexiglass, to which the fabric is connected via a curious yet ingenious looping system. Root appropriated a popular design-your-own-fabric Web platform, frequented by crafty moms and self-trained interior decorators, as a means to “have control over the fabric... to make my own patterns as the fabric and the painted part of my paintings can both be controlled and relate the two areas by shape and surface.”10 This is Root’s process: she devises the fabric segment first, determining the structure of the holder and its accompanying pattern, and then forms the plexiglass piece; the painting onto the plexiglass happens last, bringing together all the optical and material components. As the plexiglass has to be just the right weight, in order to maintain a perfect balance, this governs the order of her assembly line. The works depend on gravity to hold them in place. Unlike the paintings on aluminum, the hanging mechanism is clearly and intentionally made visible. The hidden aluminum cleat affixed to the rear of the earlier panels, which looks a lot like an oversized envelope, metamorphosed into an ingenious folding stratagem, with overlapping sashes or bows. Some works feature a single folded loop, some have as many as three, some are curvy, others straight-lined or trilateral, joining the two detached and distinctive sections. Employing plexiglass only a quarter-inch thick, from a distance the works appear unified, as the painting’s girdle looks flat. Up close, the loops and grommets reveal themselves. The wobbliness of Root’s painted lines and the shiny unevenness of the enamel expanses impart
Untitled, 2014-15. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
the works with jazzy personalities, while the uniformity of the recurring arrays on the fabric tip off their digital origins. What makes these works so visually compelling is their wondrous marriage of oppositional forces: an angular edge and a rounded curve, rigid hard plexiglass and pliable soft fabric, patterns styled online, and fuzzy blobs or wavy lines of sprayed paint. In Untitled (2015), Root juxtaposes a constellation of airbrushed white spots on plexiglass against a grid of ivory pompoms on cotton fabric. In a manner reminiscent of Sonia Delaunay’s description of color as “the skin of the world,”11 Root rhymes with color, interweaving incongruent patterns—from sub-Saharan African textiles to Daniel Buren’s vertical stripes to speckled rubber tile to shaped party confetti—so they strut, throb, and boogie. The new paintings can also be read as self-referential hieroglyphs or ciphers, a vocabulary specially cultivated over an extended period. Like the earlier eyeball and cigarette paintings, and certainly the bookmarks, Root’s works are about her relationship to art, both the looking and the making. The shapes within many of the fabric sections recall both the speech bubbles in the Migraine Headaches series, and the silhouettes of many of the painted paper collages she has produced over the years, which later birthed the forms taken by the large aluminum panels. Root is using her own pictorial lingo as a self-generative structure. Even her color wheel gains entrée as a repeating symbol in a fabric pattern, a formal device that brings to mind Allan McCollum’s The Shapes Project, initiated in 2005, in which he created an imagebreeding system that could yield a unique shape for every human being on the planet. In turn, Root spawns pictographic sequences based on the endless variations of her own past works,
Untitled, 2014-15. Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
casting them in various stages of being. By choosing to stay within the constraints of her own lexicon, appropriating from her own codex so to speak, Root stakes new ground for herself, forging a singular style. Root’s hoops insinuate the potentiality of her paintings to hold volume. Appearing as if flattened or deconstructed, they recall Rauschenberg’s Cardboard series (1971–72), alluding to a phantom functionality, a possible maneuvering, as it seems as if they could flex or enfold. As with popular children’s games made from paper, like chatterboxes, airplanes, boats, and origami creatures, or clothing accessories like belts, neckties, handkerchiefs, and scarves, Root’s paintings signal an interactivity; they are designed to perform. Hanging from the wall, at times larger than body size, their eccentric elegance brings to mind an assortment of sources, from traditional Japanese silk kimonos to flying kites, Magnatiles, the video game Minecraft, Akari lamps, Blu Dot Real Good Chairs, and the painted wood constructions of Brazilian artist
Lygia Pape (1927–2004); their mechanical presence enlivens the works, so they look as if they could swing, bend, turn, or wave at us. The patterns across the plexiglass and fabric sections zig and zag, jet and crosscut, float and percolate, radiate and traverse, as purple, red, yellow, green, black, grey, white, peach, and burgundy—in stripes, shapes, spots, and lines—intersect, converge, or dead end. Root never uses blue paint on the painted parts, and only recently “started to use a bit of blue in the fabrics designed online, but not much.”12 A recent exhibition at the Andrew Kreps Gallery included seven above life-size works, with patterns, colors or forms that appeared to be in conversation with each other; an optical dialogue played out with and within these works, with calls and responses, a ping-ponging of inter-surface dynamics. Like chapters in an unfolding story, imagery in one materializes in another, activating our visual acuity, so we become more and more adept at “reading” her rich visual dialect. As the works increase in scale, they animate their immediate environs, functioning as a catalyst, triggering a relational experience, that links us to them through an illusory game of eye play and site connectivity, recalling the magical illusionism of Fred Sandback’s yarn sculptures. They are activated by their physical placement—in relationship to the walls, ceiling, windows, and doors upon or around which they float—as well as by our own bodies, as we step up close or stand back to absorb them. We have visions of Root moving these theatrical elements around her studio and across her work tables, wrangling with their palpitating parts; we see her selecting shapes and applying paint, rearranging areas—like a jigsaw puzzle or Rubik’s Cube, there are endless permutations to be spun and limitless decisions to be made. Root takes bits and pieces of ancient, modern, and contemporary art and design sources to compose wondrously synchronistic works that obscure and ultimately enhance our preconceived notions about how we perceive the meta-visual landscape orbiting us, while also skirting the line between a painting and an object. As Root surmises, “[I’m testing] what a painting is; its formal conventions and the materials and components by which it is made.” In doing so, Root charms us with her offhand humor and her kaleidoscopic color; her compression of digital and hand-built parts, spinning together the formal and the out of this world into a pinwheel of patterns; and the collapse of hierarchies, as frame, support, edge, surface, and form collide, merge, and reunite—demanding that our eyes and bodies move around the room as the work envelops us. Amy Smith-Stewart, curator Ruth Root was born in 1967 in Chicago and lives and works in New York City.
Ruth Root Bookmarks in Grapefruit, Works and Drawings by Yoko Ono. Courtesy of the artist
1.
2.
Interview with Mary Heilmann by Kasper Konig, Vienna, May 1993: http://www.mip.at/ attachments/164 Ruth Root was a student of artist Kay Rosen, who is known for her text- and language-based works and installations, and several of the Chicago Imagists—H. C. Westermann, Christina Ramberg, Jim Nutt, and Ray Yoshida—during her graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
3.
Email conversation with the artist, July 24, 2015.
4.
Email conversation with the artist, August 12, 2015.
5.
A year later, Maureen Paley gallery in London employed the same press release for Ruth Root’s second solo exhibition at the gallery, January 15 to February 22, 2009. http://www.maureenpaley. com/exhibitions/past/2009/7-ruth-root
6-7. Email conversation with the artist, July 24, 2015 8-10. Email conversation with the artist, August 16, 2014. 11. Matilda McQuaid and Susan Brown, eds., Color Moves: Art & Fashion by Sonia Delaunay (New York: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2011), p. 10. 12. Email conversation with the artist, August 12, 2015. 13. Email conversation with the artist, August 16, 2014.
Works in the Exhibition All dimensions h x w x d in inches
Casual-as-us x 2, 1998 Marker, paint, collage on paper 6 ½ x 10 ½ Untitled, 1999 Oil on canvas 8 ½ x 11 7/8 Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Untitled, 1999 Oil, marker on paper 9x9 Collection of Martina Yamin Untitled, 1999 Oil, marker on paper 9 x 12 Collection of Augusto Arbizo Untitled, 1999 Oil, plastic on paper 9 x 12 Untitled, 1999 Oil, plastic on paper 10 x 12 Untitled, circa 1999–2000 Oil, marker on paper 8 x 10
Untitled, 2000 Oil on canvas 6½x9½ Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York Untitled, 2000 Oil, plastic on paper 11 x 10 ½ Collection of Lisa IvorianJones Untitled, 2000 Oil on paper 12 x 14 Collection of the artist Untitled, 2000 Oil on paper 12 x 15 Collection of Lisa IvorianJones Untitled, circa 2000–2001 Oil, plastic on paper 10 ½ x 11 Collection of Carolanne Patterson Untitled, circa 2000–2001 Oil, plastic on paper 10 ½ x 12 ¼ Private collection
Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg
Untitled, circa 2000–2001 Oil on paper 14 ¾ x 11 Collection of Jorge Zeno
Untitled, circa 1999–2000 Oil on paper 10 x 12 Collection of Richard Dupont
Untitled, circa 2000–2001 Oil on paper 17 x 14 ¾ Collection of Len Bellinger and Denise Sfraga
Untitled, circa 1999–2000 Oil, marker on paper 11 x 12 Collection of Scott Lorinsky
Untitled, circa 2000–2001 Oil, plastic on paper 18 x 22 Collection of Thomas Blackman Untitled, 2000–2001 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 Untitled, 2000–2001 Oil on canvas 24 x 20 Untitled, 2000–2001 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 Untitled, 2000–2001 Oil on canvas 24 x 30 Untitled, 2000–2001 Oil on canvas 24 x 18 Untitled, 2003 Oil on paper 15 x 15
Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 101 x 87 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 102 x 94 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 106 x 71 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, and various paints on plexiglass 110 x 95 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 114 x 68 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 117 x 61
Collection of the artist Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 74 x 38 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 80 x 71 Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 89 x 95
Untitled, 2015 Fabric, enamel, various paints on plexiglass 124 x 66 Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
Like Ruth Root’s paintings, the bookmarks sport tabs and oversized appendages, so that they stick out of the sides and edges of the books. Root conceives something that is functional, looks a lot like a painting, but is to be placed inside another object: a free and easy take-away that is inherently interactive. - Amy Smith-Stewart “Somehow, my old drawings that were pieced from painted paper and printed scraps were around the studio and started to be used to bookmark oversized art books, then the bookmarks became a project of their own. It was as if these huge monumental paintings became smaller and elongated, functional and bookmarking other things that I wanted to think about or incorporate into my work.” - Ruth Root This publication includes a limited edition of 2,000 Ruth Root bookmarks.