Emmanuela Soria Ruiz, The Mule, 2019. Video installation with steel armature and metal desk: 29 x 48 ¼ x 24 in., video: 5:00 min. Image courtesy of the artist.
ALT TEXT: Photograph of a green metal desk underneath which a monitor is playing a video of a hand raising and lowering the hem of a skirt up and down a leg.
Opening reception: Saturday, November 13, 2021, 5–8 PM PST
Content warning: this exhibition includes references to sexual assault, animal cruelty, abuse, sexism, and misogyny.
A man is walking in the fields with his mule and his dog. The mule, carrying too heavy a load stops, digging her knees into the ground and collapses. The man, getting angry and impatient, starts hitting the poor animal with a stick, until the mule has had enough and says: “Antonio, this is how you treat me after all these years of faithful service in which I have never faltered?” The man, terrified, starts to run with his dog alongside him. They don’t stop until a few miles away, where they stop to catch their breath under a tree. “Holy shit!!!!” says the dog “What a scare the Mule has given us, when it started speaking!!!”
Does trauma take a singular point of view, like a monologue? Or does it stretch beyond the silo of the psyche, skulking into narrative environments, social interactions, and even conceptions of a fragmented selfhood? Emmanuela Soria Ruiz’s videos, sculptures, installations, and drawings in her solo exhibition The Longest Leg subvert power dynamics implicit within the act of looking. Drawing upon narrative literary structures, Greek and Roman mythologies, and strategies of visual displacement, Soria Ruiz destabilizes the singularity of abuse and trauma through constellations of images, embodiments, and objects.
Works invite viewers to lift a skirt to watch a video, to stoop down to catch a glimpse of subtitles, or to track the looping (non)revelation of “the longest leg” beneath a kilt. Consequently, viewers are both implicated in their speculations, and simultaneously thwarted by the works’ resistances to gratifying disclosure. In these uncomfortable positions, Soria Ruiz “forc[es] viewers to perform the sometimes violent gestures necessary to look at the work, [as her] sculptural language aim[s] at making explicit the double condition of spectatorship as both voyeur and object.” In the ongoing aftermaths of the #MeToo movement, institutional reckonings with sexual and physical harassment, and emergent trauma-informed modes of care, Soria Ruiz’s works operate as testimonies, warnings, and call-outs, urging viewers to reckon with their inevitable entanglements within patriarchal culture.
The Longest Leg is organized by independent curator Laurel V. McLaughlin in collaboration with Fuller Rosen Gallery. The exhibition is accompanied by a series of free public programs in partnership with performer Allie Hankins, FLOCK Dance Center, Oregon Contemporary, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art Low-Residency MFA in Visual Studies and Hallie Ford Graduate School of Willamette University. This programming is generously supported in part by a 2021 Regional Arts & Culture Council Make|Learn|Build Grant. The performance program Private Speculations is further financially made possible with the support of a 2021 PICE Mobility Grant of Acción Cultural Española (AC/E).
About the artist
Emmanuela Soria Ruiz (she/her/hers) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator based in Philadelphia. Through both research-based and intuitive methodologies, her work investigates hegemonies embedded in personal histories, mythology, literature, and history of architecture. Originally from Spain, she moved to New York where she attended The Cooper Union for her BFA. In 2020 she obtained her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been supported by a Sachs Innovation Grant for the project “Stages of Learning,” co-led with performance studies scholar Emilio Martinez Poppe. Additionally, she has participated in residencies at The American Academy in Rome, The Performance Intensive in Philadelphia, The Cervantes Institute in Marrakech, Arts Letters and Numbers in Albany, ACRE projects, and The School of Making and Thinking, and has been awarded travel fellowships by the Menschel Fellowship at the Cooper Union and the Manuel Rivera foundation in Granada, Spain. Soria Ruiz’s work has been exhibited at multiple venues in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Berlin, Marrakech, and Granada.
About the curator
Laurel V. McLaughlin (she/her/hers) is a writer, curator, and art historian from Philadelphia based in Portland, OR (on the unceded lands of the Bands of Chinook, Clackamas, Cowlitz, Kathlamet, Molalla, Multnomah, Tualatin Kalapuya, and Wasco peoples). McLaughlin holds a BA in English and Art History as a Presidential Scholar from Wake Forest University, MAs from The Courtauld Institute of Art and Bryn Mawr College, and is currently a Ph.D. Candidate at Bryn Mawr, writing a dissertation concerning performative migratory aesthetics. She has presented her research at conferences such as the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, Hong Kong; the College Art Association, New York; and Performance Studies International, Calgary. Her research has been supported by a 2020–2021 Luce/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship in American Art and a 2022–2023 Bryn Mawr College Dean’s Fellowship. Her criticism, essays, and interviews have been published in Art Papers, Art Practical, Performa Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, and Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, and her co-edited volume on the work of Tania El Khoury is forthcoming in 2022 by Amherst College/ Lever Press. McLaughlin has organized exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the University of Pennsylvania in collaboration with the Arthur Ross Gallery and the ICA Philadelphia, Vox Populi, the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture, and Paragon Arts Gallery. She is currently organizing the traveling survey, Emilio Rojas: tracing a wound through my body, September 2–November 13, 2021 at Lafayette College and forthcoming exhibitions at Artspace, New Haven.
About the gallery
Fuller Rosen Gallery was founded in 2018 by artists EM Fuller (she/her) and BriAnna Rosen (she/her) as a collaborative curatorial project. The gallery exhibits regional, national, and international emerging artists who address urgent, contemporary issues.
Visitor information: Thursday–Sunday, 12-5 PM