Alison Ruttan at Monique Meloche - Chicago - Brief Article

Art in America, April, 2002 by Susan Snodgrass

Using pornography as source material, Alison Ruttan creates titillating digitally based works that seamlessly blend animation and video-based erotic imagery. The title of her recent exhibition, "Chromophilia," is a response to painter David Batchelor's book Chromophobia, which argues that Western culture represses the pleasurable aspects of color. Accordingly, in the two videos, six prints and wallpaper installation on view, the artist explores the interplay of sexual and visual desire through equations of color and pleasure.

Her past works, which associate carnality with consumption, range from loaves of bread baked in metal pans cast from the artist's ass to photographs appropriated from porn magazines and layered with images of food. Shifting from two- and three-dimensional mediums to video has provided Ruttan with a fresh arena for experimentation and significantly broadened her wry discourse on sexuality. Here, the artist digitizes found pornographic footage, tracks the on-screen movement, and then introduces animated forms into the action, abstract shapes and vibrant colors that suggest a pastiche of modernist painting.

In the video installation Chromophilia, duplicate images of a copulating couple are overlaid with animated blobs of yellow; the original background of the scene is replaced with a flat blue plane. The resulting field of sinuous, cartoonish figures recalls Matisse's painting The Dance and is dual-projected high onto the gallery wall, where it reads as a live-action architectural frieze. The animated revelers obscure yet mimic the original sex, as they bump and grind to a sampled version of the Nutcracker Suite.

The video Nancy, which takes a more narrative approach, is created using a similar process. However, the titular subject, an obese woman also plucked from a porn film, remains fully visible at all times, though blurred. This large naked figure is silhouetted against a backdrop of luscious red and interacts seductively with an animated white mass that morphs into various abstract and objective shapes. The representational forms--a mirror, a swan, a cloud, a road--seem to symbolize altered or projected states of being. Throughout, the woman's features are hidden from the viewer, except for a dot of fuzzy black hair. In the end, she is transformed into the pug-nosed comic-book character Nancy.

The accompanying prints either capture moments from the videos or further Ruttan's experiments with abstraction and primary color, their flatness underscoring the artist's interest in merging the formal vocabulary of painting and digital media. Ruttan's union of high and low art forms unleashes repressed desire and results in works that are intelligent, playful and delightfully naughty.