Artists
Ellen Rutt
Across a range of physical and digital media, murals, paintings, performance, installations and collage, Rutt uses an abstract lexicon of color and form to study intangible ideas like boundaries and expansion. The works on canvas are primarily made outside of the studio in a wide range of environments—forests, deserts, rural fields, cities, dumpsters, recycling centers, abandoned buildings and even lakes—that speak to the complex and contradicting intersections of consumption, place, identity, and nature. Rutt’s work surrenders to the possibilities and limitations of place in a tender call and response between control and improvisation. As an organizer, she wields the tools of visual communication to amplify marginalized voices, collaborate with existing environmental justice initiatives and build a future that prioritizes race and class equity and multispecies flourishing. Not only is the environment a leading agent in the production of Rutt’s paintings, but its well-being is also a concern that informs her way of life. Over the past several years, she has been working towards utilizing materials that are plastic-free, renewable, biodegradable, or otherwise non-toxic. While sustainable efforts are at the forefront of Rutt’s practice, the artist also admits to, in certain instances, using left over acrylic paint lying around her house from past projects. This exercise may sound contradictory(because it is), however, it’s precisely the duplicit narrative the action presents that Rutt aims to explore through her work. There lies a fascination in dissecting the reality of being one thing and simultaneously the exact opposite, and how that tension is unavoidable living under the systems of today’s day and age
B. 1989; Lives and works in Detroit, MI.
