Alison Ruttan
Alison Ruttan
Alison
Ruttan
b. 1954 STUDIO IN CHICAGO, IL
Images of destruction from around the world pass before us every day in the rapid cycle of 24- hour news. We rarely take the time to consider the lives lost in acts of violence happening in far-flung regions. Alison Ruttan fixes her attention on buildings destroyed by violence in the Middle East—Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq— and recreates the lost structures in clay. Focusing on news photographs of bombed sites, Ruttan first draws blueprints for the destroyed building, inferring what she can from available imagery. Next, she builds a miniature of the structure in clay before attacking it with a BB gun and other tools. Finally she glazes and fires the damaged structure to emulate what is left of the original. Her painstaking process reasserts the time it took to erect the original building, fixing in clay both the structure’s integrity and the violence perpetrated against it.
The truth is, most of the buildings that have collapsed are recent buildings, poorly constructed, out of the Modernist model. It’s a metaphor for the failure of Modernism in the Middle East. Consider the architectural utopia that emerged with this kind of structure, and what actually has sifted down to parts of the world where the look of the architecture is retained, but none of the utopian visions that went with it.
— Alison Ruttan
