Lauren Ruth is a multimedia artist whose sculptures, installations, and performances unravel familiar iconographies and social rituals to reestablish meanings. By stretching the scale of familiar human anatomies, her work allows bodies and objects to take on new agency. Tongue banners hang like flags of mute nations, oversized ears eavesdrop on visitors’ conversations, and hand-powered chocolate fountains stand-in for a body. Implicating the viewer in a setting for an event that may or may not have occurred, the work probes the 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; and the University of the South, Sewanee, among others. Ruth’s artistic collaboration The Shaft, with Maiza Hixson, has performed at 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 been artist in residence at Arteles Creative Center, ACRE Projects, Cannonball, Ox-bow, and the Recycled Artist in Residency in Philadelphia, and she has lectured and presented at 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 Art at the California State University, Chico. She teaches courses in a variety of sculptural mediums and techniques, including traditional, performative, and emerging practices. Ruth's pedagogy focuses on process, experimentation, and interdisciplinary practices. She is particularly interested in the intersection of digital and analog processes, intersectional approaches to art criticism, socially engaged art, and the performative potential of the body. She practices a philosophy of art-like-life, life-like-art.