RUTH BUCHANAN

25 February—9 March 2008
Architect as Building 2007
DV transferred to DVD
duration: 3 min 30 sec, looped
Courtesy of the artist

Ruth Buchanan’s practice spans across video, text, 35 mm slide, sculpture and sound. Buchanan’s video works often employ obviously hand-made or performative elements, in which she stars herself.

Older Lovers etc takes the form of a slide show projection based on the case-study of early 20^th Century New Zealand painter Flora Scales. The work incorporates both text and appropriated paintings from New Zealand Art History. Buchanan has written that: ‘By addressing this specific history I aim to reclaim and reanimate legacies that characterise artistic agency in the present… this has opened up questions of agency, document, myth making and how one is able to ‘speak’ as an artist.’

In the work Architect as Building Buchanan plays with ideas of portraiture and performance. The work is the same length as the tinny musical soundtrack, which the concealed figure seems to be humming along to. The pop-y melody undermines the pathos of the lone figure.

Ruth Buchanan (Te Ati Awa, Taranaki) was born in New Plymouth in 1980. She gained a BFA from Elam School of Fine Art, Auckland in 2002 and an MA (Fine Art) from the Willem de Kooning Academie, Piet Zwart Institute for Post Graduate Study and Research, Rotterdam, Netherlands in 2007. She has staged solo exhibitions; ‘The Importance of Invisibility’, Issue Project Room, New York, 2005 and ‘Open in Total Darkness’, Lothringer13/Laden, Munich, Germany, 2007 and appeared in several group exhibitions, including: ‘My loose thread’, Ben Kauffman Gallery, Berlin, 2006; ‘Normal Desires’, rm103, Auckland, 2007; ‘Knowing Nothing of Agility’, TENT Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 2007 and ‘Walking on Talking’, Gambia Castle, Auckland, 2007. Buchanan is currently a Jan Van Eyck Academie Fine Arts Researcher in residence, Maastricht, Netherlands.