Lauren Ruth is a multimedia artist whose sculptures and installations playfully engage public audiences. By stretching the scale and scope of familiar human anatomies and remixing architecture and forms of commercial signage, her work allows the body to take on new agency and pushes viewers toward a more participatory role. Large tongue banners hang like flags of mute nations, oversized ears eavesdrop on visitors’ conversations, and hand-powered chocolate fountains become stand-ins for a body. Implicating the viewer in a setting for an event that may or may not have occurred, the work calls into question the notion of a "public" body and probes the interstitial space between absence and presence, agency and autonomy, intimacy and alienation.
Ruth has exhibited at the Corcoran College of Art + Design; the Delaware Contemporary; Coop Gallery, Nashville; Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville; Root Division, San Francisco; the University of the South, Sewanee; and others. Ruth’s artistic collaboration The Shaft, with Maiza Hixson, has exhibited and performed at venues including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Soap Factory, Minneapolis; H.J. Miossi Gallery at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo; and the Koban Project, Baltimore. Ruth has attended artist residencies at ACRE Projects, Cannonball, Ox-bow, the Recycled Artist in Residency and has lectured and presented widely at venues including Cranbrook Academy of Art, The University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Dartmouth College, Open Engagement, and SECAC. Ruth holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Ruth lives and works in Chico, CA and is Assistant Professor of Sculpture at the California State University, Chico.