Aïda Ruilova: Lets Go

Solo exhibition

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery, in association with Salon 94, is pleased to present Lets Go, the second NY solo exhibition by video artist Aïda Ruilova, on view May 4 – June 4, 2005. Ruilova’s work was featured in Greater New York 2005 at P.S.1, the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 Venice Biennale.

Ruilova creates short format videos with sound, working in a tradition of cinematic collage. For this exhibition, she will present a 2-channel video projection entitled Countdowns, 2004, and five individual single-channel works – respectively titled Uh Oh, OK, Um, Alright, and the title piece Lets Go - each shown on separate monitors. Ruilova continues to create non-narrative works that attempt to collapse and compress time. Tightly edited montages are partly inspired by the B-horror film genre as well as filmmakers such as Andrei Tarkovsky and Jean-Luc Godard. Her work reveals a strong interest in music (she previously performed with the band Alva), creating sequences that are comprised of disturbing staged visual imagery with exaggerated vocals and sound. In all the featured works, normal phrases are reduced to the obtuse words we use daily as filler - “um”, “ok”, “uh-oh” – what the artist refers to as ‘hiccups’ or an artificial language. The videos are filmed in basements, corridors, and cellars, as well as outdoors. The solitary figures in the installation of single channel works can be seen as ‘robots’: while shot still, the subjects are animated by the artist’s camera moving around them, creating the effect of a rotating space. Real-time is eschewed to present these symbolically charged tableaus, which are repeatedly intercut, making the videos strangely captivating.

Aïda Ruilova was born in Wheeling, WV and educated at The School of Visual Arts and The University of South Florida, Tampa. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad, including Salon 94, NY; The Moore Space, Miami; Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporanea di Trento, Italy; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Her work has been featured in Artforum, The New York Times, and Frieze, among others. She is a recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Grant and an ArtPace Residency, TX, and her work is in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum and Bard College.