STERLING RUBY

Slasher Posters and Pillow Works

November 8, 2007 - January 12, 2008

Horror cinema, through its halcyon years in the last three decades of the 20th century, has often demonstrated our unnerving capacity as a species to revel in the intoxicating formal qualities of dismemberment. Practitioners within this genre, from master auteurs to low budget hacks, have indulged in compulsory narrative constructions designed primarily to allow for episodic intervals of the compositional disruption of the human body. The Slasher marauds through ordered space as a sublime deconstructionist. He or It (and it is most often a conflation of these two) is an incomprehensible purveyor of not only corrosive death or even senseless depravity and desecration, but ultimately of the reconfiguration of representational space itself.

Wildly popular as a form of mass social ritual, horror cinema has spawned an attendant universe of related ephemera, cheap mementos-mori in the form of tawdry movie posters emblazoned with the recurrent trademarks of our most abhorrent villains. This merchandise enters domestic space like welcomed vermin, with a whiff of the crypt’s odour, as a reminder of the constant shadow presence of disorder beneath the veneer of our routine realm.

In this, his first exhibition at Bernier/Eliades, Sterling Ruby conjures something of the Slasher’s formal interventions. Extracting and collaging elements of horror ephemera and a Frankenstein patchwork of provincial fabrics, Ruby presents a miasma of ruptured signifiers in a sort of nightmare rec room of reconfigured posters and cushions. But rather than merely regurgitating the shock and gore of his sources, Ruby instead coolly uses this material to further his ongoing meditations on domesticity and masculinity, exploring various perversions and inversions of both.

Present here are his mainstay avatar objects—familiar, vaguely anthropomorphic study pillows improbably named husbands—now monstrously bloated, cobbled together from the scrapheap of a shopworn American identity. The flayed remains of various Red State garments (acid-wash denim, eagle-bedecked sweatshirts, deer hunter’s orange flannel) are quilted, merged into obscure heterogeneous lumps. Ruby’s melding of these already charged garments with peripheral images of horror inflects them with a slightly sinister quality; like Charles Manson’s dreadful kaleidoscopic vest, culled by the many hands of his female cultists, or the “woman suit” of victims’ skins fashioned by the killer Buffalo Bill in the Silence of the Lambs, these are fabrics that seem to cohabitate with evil, bearing mute witness to some invisible but unspeakable violence.

Likewise, his eclectic deployment of “slasher posters” curiously liberated of their original subjectivity belies another transformation. With this repurposed horror imagery, where our expectations for blood, the Reaper, and a certain type of bodily trauma are most highly stimulated, Ruby intervenes instead with formal hybrids and incisions that perforate these tropes in favor of a more cosmic vision.

Erik Frydenborg, 2007

Born in 1972, Sterling Ruby graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received his MFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In the past year, he participated in the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art and Red Eye: L.A. Artists, at the Rubell Collection in Miami. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, The Drwing Center, New York and Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea , Bergamo. He will also take part in the first international group exhibition at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing.

The gallery remains open from Tuesday to Friday 10:30–20:00,Saturday 12:00–16:00.