Alison Ruttan | Falling to Pieces | October 20 - November 30, 2024
Midnight, 2020, 2-part ceramic, 22 x 21 x 9 inches
Exhibition Dates: October 20 – November 30, 2024
Opening Reception: Sunday, October 20, 2024, 3:00 - 6:00 PM
Join us afterwards for a private happy hour at the Quincy Street Distillery
Exhibition on view: Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1:00 – 5:00 PM
Artist Talk: Saturday, November 16, 2024, 2:00 PM
The Riverside Arts Center’s Freeark Gallery is pleased to present Falling to Pieces, a solo exhibition of Alison Ruttan’s ceramic sculpture. Please join us for an opening reception on Sunday, October 20th from 3-6pm and an artist talk on Saturday, November 16th at 2pm. The exhibition is on view Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 1-5pm through November 30th.
“Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that’s ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, yet we’re destroying the only home we have.”
–Jane Goodall
Home, be it a building or a planet, conjures up thoughts of comfort and safety. However, current newsfeeds are filled with images of war-torn structures, flooded villages, and devastated housing. Alison Ruttan transforms her observations of this human-created violence, climate change, and neglect into moving architectural sculptures.
Ruttan’s queries into human behavior led her to Jane Goodall’s research of chimpanzees, our species’ closest living relatives, and their ability to strategically wage war against each other. The artist first transferred these observations of aggression into photography then took up ceramics in 2011. With armed conflicts in Syria, Sudan, Ukraine, and Gaza, climate change wreaking havoc in the forms of wildfires and floods, and the increase of mass shootings, the topic of violence in her art has become more universal.
The ceramic pieces depict miniature buildings collapsing, the walls crumbled, as if a bomb had been dropped. Her somber palette of earthen reds, deep greens, and smokey blues ooze down in thick glazing. To achieve the appearance of destruction the artist relies on chance, combining low fire and high fire clays in the kiln along with physically toppling over parts of her sculpture. In at least one case, she repurposed the remnants of a shattered sculpture to create a new piece.
Her newest series of ceramic rooftops replicates the all too often viewed footage of submerged homes after flooding from hurricanes. A portion of the “Rising Water” project that will be shown at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2026 is exhibited outside in the Riverside Arts Center’s sculpture garden. Rows of these rooftops appear as a neighborhood of houses seemingly submerged into the pebbled ground. The installation reminds us of climate change disasters, while the art itself is subject to the elements of nature, as the shadows, the rain, and even the squirrels, add to the visual interplay.
As the world seems to be falling apart, we also grapple with our own personal lives. The buildings could be viewed as one’s own body, subject to the violence of human-caused circumstances and elements out of our control. Our humanity is expressed in Ruttan’s ceramic buildings that are embedded into found furniture. With this contrast in scale, the furniture caresses the broken structures, reminding us of the domestic contents of what once were inside and the human lives that called it home.
–Joanne Aono, curator
Alison Ruttan is an interdisciplinary, research-based artist working within the realms of sculpture, ceramics, architecture, and photography. She has exhibited at numerous local and international venues including Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago; Wit, Wageningen, Netherlands; the Chicago Cultural Center; 4th Ward Project Space, Chicago; and the Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, Michigan. Her art has been profiled in the Chicago Tribune, WTTW PBS, Art in America, and the Chicago Reader among many others.
Ruttan is the recipient of several Illinois Arts Council grants and Faculty grants from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been awarded residencies in Krems, Austria, Escondido, California, and the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. Her art is held in private and public collections including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas and the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Lost Records, 2019, 2-part ceramic with bookshelves, 16.25 x 14 x 64 inches