Aïda Ruilova: I’m so wild about
your strawberry mouth
March 23–May 4, 2013
Opening: Saturday, March 23, 2013, 6–8pm
Kayne Griffin Corcoran
2902 Nebraska Avenue
Santa Monica, CA 90404
Kayne Griffin Corcoran is pleased to present I’m so wild about your strawberry mouth, Aïda Ruilova’s first gallery exhibition in Los Angeles. The exhibition will premier a new video work with the film director Abel Ferrara as its subject, a series of drawings executed on movie posters from the erotic Emmanuelle films, as well as her first sculptural work to date.
Ruilova initiated her collaboration with Ferrara with a single question: “Please speak about Pier Paolo Pasolini’s death and how you would direct your own death scene in relation to his?” In her resultant 45-minute video work, Ferrara unreservedly weaves between Pasolini’s life and his own until the two become indiscernible. Ferrara sees Pasolini’s death in cinematic terms, calling it a “beautiful movie.” The interplay between the willful dramatization of a life (and death) and the inevitability of a director’s own identity being formed by his films is central to Ruilova. Within the video, fact and fiction merge, conspiracy and truth overlap and the destructive tendencies of desire are revealed.
Similarly, in Ruilova’s drawings, the object of desire is both exposed and concealed. Emmanuelle is the bored housewife who lives out her sexual fantasies through her affairs and subsequently becomes an object of fantasy for the viewer. She is the archetype of a desirable woman over which Ruilova paints pools of black with a caricature of peeping eyes. This paradox is heightened as Ruilova confronts a destructive search for desire through a bed of nails made up of hundreds of aluminum diamonds. Corporal in size, this bed is both erotically inviting and forbidden.
The highly fictionalized autobiography of actor/director Klaus Kinski inspired both the title of the exhibition, I’m so wild about your strawberry mouth, and embodies for Ruilova reoccurring themes of self-caricature, brazen desire, intoxication and ultimately escape that are evident throughout the exhibition.
Aïda Ruilova was born in Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1974. Her first museum survey exhibition was organized by the Aspen Art Museum and St. Louis Contemporary Museum of Art and traveled to the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff; Cleveland MOCA; and New Orleans Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been included in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial and the Berlin Biennial, and she was a nominee for the 2006 Hugo Boss Prize. She currently lives in New York.
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