AIDA RUILOVA
By Amada Cruz, July 2004
Aïda Ruilova’s work is both punk and classic. With a sly smile, this classically-trained musician with the operatic name will tell you she was raised in Tampa, Florida, “the Death Metal capital of the United States”. Her quick-cut, rapid-fire videos reveal her interests in avant-garde cinematic techniques borrowed from such academically-revered auteurs as Jean-Luc Godard and Andrei Tarkovsky as well the campy horror visions of B-movie directors Jean Rollin and Roger Corman. Her psychologically charged scenes appear for mere seconds as ever-so-brief glimpses of a netherworld of lost souls in decrepit homes and abandoned sites.
Ruilova is known for her single-channel videos that depict manic individuals in eerie interiors unnervingly chanting banal phrases such as “You’re pretty” or “come here.” Her most recent video installation, Countdowns, featured in this exhibition, is also her most ambitious, an expanded and more complex version of her early work. About two minutes long on continuous loops, Countdowns, is a double projection of scenes that quickly zoom in and out of view, offering apparition-like visions of people accompanied by numbers in various guises. Influenced by the counting scenes in the Sesame Street television show, Ruilova’s numbers are ephemeral -- made of lit candles, sand, and fake flowers. Rather than the cheery kiddie-pop visions of TV, Ruilova’s numbers exist in more mysterious milieus -- held by a woman sitting in a huge drain pipe (#4), nestled among leaves in dark woods (#6), and scrawled on a tree trunk like a hex (#8). The numbers literally count down, like those at the start of a film, and with each repeating sequence, Ruilova gives more or less information, subtly changing similar scenes. Countdowns is a fast piece that bombards the viewer with images and aggressive sounds. The speed of the work creates the illusion of fast motion and lots of action, but the changes that occur within each frame happen gradually, as if by mutation, and the overall mood within each scene is subdued. The number 4 first appears as a candle held up by a hand, and more of the figure is revealed in subsequent scenes; the number 5 painted on to the sand dune disappears in later sections as a man tramples through it. Ruilova thus undermines the structuring device of the piece causing us to question what we have just seen.
Shot outdoors, Countdowns contrast with the single-channel works where all the actions occur indoors with a fearsome sense of claustrophobia (reinforced by the frames of the monitors.) The settings are decidedly urban, post-industrial landscapes with one exception, the deep woods. Ruilova has said, “I’m drawn to the city’s negatives spaces. Its tunnels, its dark-lit corners and its nights.” The dirt pile under the bridge on which the number 1 appears, the cement blocks with their exposed rebars and the spray painted number 9, and even the sand pile with the number 5 could serve as settings for post-apocalyptic revelations. Ruilova admits an interest in those undistinguishable films from the 1970s and 80s that portray a devastated New York such as Escape from New York. Her desolate sites also recall the “entropic landscapes,” which the artist Robert Smithson wrote about as he ventured through the depleted industrial periphery of Passaic, New Jersey.
Ruilova has taped outdoors before in two works, both Untitled (2003 and 2004), which were also her first projections. Untitled (2003) takes place on a beach with a woman lying on a camera crane from the 1970s. As the crane moves in and out of view, the sound is of heavy breathing, anthropomorphizing the machine and adding an aura of dread. The subsequent Untitled (2004) work places a woman on the side of a cliff by water. She lies peacefully at its edge while the tide moves in and out as an audio recording device mysteriously plays the heavy breathing synched to the movement of the waves. These works share many characteristics -- the shoreline settings, silent, still women, and expansiveness of the landscape -- and can be considered companion pieces.
Ruilova’s protagonists lie quiet in these projections. The tense mood of her other work is intensified by the almost drone-like voices of her characters and their extreme psychological states. The various protagonists in Countdowns are not only silent but usually faceless and appear detached or supernaturally unmoving. However, as in all her work, the sound is crucial to the intense pitch of the piece. The almost metallic noises are a mix of found sounds and music from a collaboration by two bands, Black Dice and Wolf Eyes, which Ruilova combined. Herself a musician, Ruilova has recorded two cds with the experimental music band Alva. Their music could serve as the soundtrack of a horror film or one of Ruilova’s videos with vaguely ecclesiastical organs, violins, and the almost feral, high-pitched voices of three women.
The dark romanticism in Ruilova’s work has been attributed to a gothic sensibility that has also been used to describe the work of a young generation of artists reared on Goth Rock of the 1990s as well as bad horror flicks. Ruilova’s sympathies are more in tune with the ominous tone of the stories of Edgar Allen Poe and the atmospheric paintings of the German artist Caspar David Friedrich and the British J. W. Turner. Their moody landscapes influenced the Untitled works as well as Countdowns with their suggestions of expansive backgrounds, but Ruilova undermines the romantic clichés by turning her figures into almost incidental elements within the landscapes (in Countdowns) or merging them with inanimate objects (in Untitled, 2003).
The menacing sense of dread in Ruilova’s videos is a result of her expert appropriation and tweaking of scary movie tropes that is compounded by their familiarity. Her images have a sense of the uncanny that is genuinely creepy. In writing about the uncanny, the artist Mike Kelley has stated, “This sensation is tied to the act of remembering.... Such past feelings...seem to have been provoked by disturbing, unrecallable memories.... The uncanny is a somewhat muted sense of horror: horror tinged with confusion.” It is a fitting description of the work of Ruilova.