Carmen Ruiz-Davila
Cleveland, OH
2005-06 Artist-In-Resident
"At Sculpture Space I begun to create an installation that explores the ancient Spanish myth of El Dorado, the lost city of gold. The project draws connections between various cultures and time periods, establishing parallel worlds. The narrative will be presented as a contemporary tableau, using the idea of gold as a reoccurring historical and cultural motif as well as a metaphor for desire and destruction. The piece consists of 8 polyhedrons/ simulated chunks of land that are 5 to 8 feet in width, height and length. The polyhedrons will be covered in reflective gold sign paper. In the space above the polyhedrons there will be various objects including a cock-fighting scene with gamecocks, gilded goblets, a deconstructed model of the Taj Mahal, and plaster elephant tusks. There will also be a harpsichord with a 5-foot fiberglass plane suspended over it. The plane will have a hose that runs from underneath the plane into the reservoir of water in the harpsichord. At Sculpture Space I also experimented with flocking techniques. I created white plaster balls in various sizes that were then flocked with white material. These pieces will surround the gold polyhedrons and be part of the El Dorado installation. Sculpture Space provided me invaluable time to explore the conceptual basis of this project and allowed me to create work in an environment that was free of space limitations. The staff was extremely supportive of all of my endeavors and greatly facilitated my project."
"My work combines models of desire, debasement, and culturally mediated eroticism. I am concerned with the systems in which cultures are filtered and then used within society and its economy. The work is fabricated from layers of truths, fictions, and amalgams of associations held within public and private imagination. I use historical accounts that are blended and distorted, becoming fabrication, in order to construct parallels within contemporary conditions. The narratives are transformed into fantasy where history becomes rumor and culture becomes commerce." — Carmen Ruiz-Davila
About the Artist
Ruiz-Davila received her undergraduate degree from Tulane University in Art History and Latin American History, and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Her work has been shown nationally in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, New Orleans and in Cleveland, where she had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA, Cleveland) through the Wendy L. Moore Emerging Artist Series. She has been an Artist-in Residence in the Glass Department of the Cleveland Institute of Art and an Emerging-Artist-in-Residence at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle. She recently won a full fellowship to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Ruiz-Davila is a native of Barcelona, Spain.