Three different couples in their underwear tickle each other on the three large screens of Alison Ruttan’s video installation at Monique Meloche, Love Me Not. The scenes produce an overwhelming avalanche of flesh and gestures at once playful and aggressive as the ticklers lunge for a torso, try to fend off the other person, or grab the sole of a partner’s foot. The camera tracks around them in circles, adding to the delirium.
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Ruttan’s long interest in the “emotional content of physical expression,” an interest she sees as more anthropological than voyeuristic, comes in part from her childhood. Her family moved often, and she attended six different elementary schools: she says she grew up “like a tourist. Moving to so many different places, I would try to figure out what the rules were.” Her economist father also encouraged study–a family outing might consist of going to the beach and collecting shells, but the next two weeks would be spent “researching them, categorizing them, and putting them on boards properly labeled.” When Ruttan lived in the Philippines in fourth and fifth grade, “My father stressed the importance of respecting cultural differences and trying to understand them. There were a lot of foods that we were told we had to taste and couldn’t make ugly faces. It was like being in a strange wonderland.”
In 1990 she moved to Chicago to begin graduate studies in painting at the School of the Art Institute, starting out making mostly abstract works. In her second year she began creating installations, and by graduation she was covering mirrors with latex (to suggest flesh), reading about the philosophy of the body, and studying the body-oriented work of Kiki Smith and Ann Hamilton. She also discovered a medical textbook titled Internal Surgery, which she says “had a real draw because it strongly disturbed me. I could almost feel physical pain looking at the illustrations. I’ve always been such a physical wimp–when I had to get shots as a kid I’d back into a corner and scream. For quite a while now I’ve been interested in things that trigger responses deeply embedded in our biological nature, things that tend to bypass our intellect. Part of the challenge looking at what I’m uncomfortable with is finding a way to control it.” A year after graduation she made a sculpture that looked like a half section of a head and put it in an upside-down fedora.
When: Through March 12
Where: Butcher Shop, 1319 W. Lake, third floor
