RU MARSHALL

Ru Marshall Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

Ru Marshall

Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York

ARTIST BIO

Ru Marshall (b. 1960) is a nonbinary visual artist and writer. They have painted and employed photographic processes on mirrored surfaces for over twenty-five years—vinyl, glass, fabric, and Dibond. These reflective images shift and change depending on the position of the viewer and the quality of the light, capturing the fleeting and interactive nature of perception and the natural and urban landscape seen in passing from car and train windows. In Marshall’s most recent work, they explore our compromised experience of nature in a time of environmental catastrophe. For the last seven years, they have been developing an improvisational dance practice and recently completed work on Interlope, dance/video project which took place in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, and which explored gender, the interaction between human and organic gestures, and our search for solace in a natural world we have failed to respect.

Marshall has had exhibitions of their visual work at Participant Inc., Triple Candie, The New Orlean Contemporary Arts Center, Thread Waxing Space, The Brooklyn Museum, Centro Cultural Rector Ricardo Rojas, The Drawing Center, Maryland Art Place, White Columns, and numerous other venues in the United States, Europe, and Latin America. They have received fellowships and residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale, The Banff Centre, and the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Marshall’s novel, A Separate Reality, a queer coming-of-age tale set in Phoenix, Arizona, was released by Carroll & Graf (2006) and nominated for a Lambda Book Award. American Trickster, their forthcoming biography of the faux anthropologist and cult leader Carlos Castaneda, will be released by Red Hen Press in 2026 and has been optioned for film/TV by Hybrid Cienma. They have twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize for their short fiction, appearing in N + 1 online, The Evergreen Review, The Barcelona Review, The Kenyon Review, Your Impossible Voice, Another Chicago Magazine, and numerous other publications. They attended the Rhode Island School of Design and graduated from Wesleyan University.

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TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE September 3 – November 2, 2024 HANNAM, SEOUL

TRANSPACIFIC: LOVE DIFFERENCE

September 3 – November 2, 2024

JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam

21-18 Hannam-daero 20-gil

Yongsan-gu, Seoul

South Korea 04419

IN THE ATRIUM

VOID IN WRITING

September 3 – November 2, 2024

JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam

21-18 Hannam-daero 20-gil

Yongsan-gu, Seoul

South Korea 04419

In celebrating its 20th anniversary, JENNIFER BAAHNG is making a significant mark. The gallery is opening its first Asia galleries, in Seoul, featuring TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers and Love Difference. This exhibition, presented in two parts at two locations, is a testament to two decades of artistic excellence. It showcases over a hundred boundary-leaping, subtle, playful, and political works presented by a diverse group of twelve artists and one poet, each with their own unique perspective. Perfect Lovers, opening September 5 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Gangnam, is an intimate space of vast intrigue, debuting polyphonic collectives of love, alienation, and the absurdism of ideal love. Love Difference, opening September 3 at JENNIFER BAAHNG Hannam, explores creative differences, alluding to Manet, Warhol, and the art of loneliness. While New York is its home, JENNIFER BAAHNG is expanding its horizons, pivoting to the Pacific to share expertise and resources to develop the collective in Contemporary Art.

Perfect Lovers, installed in the Gangnam district of Seoul, attends to splendid superficiality and yields a rich psychological weave. It is refreshingly sensuous and seeks flexible interpretations: Rather than assert an identity or contest a social order, Kevin Melchionne steps into an imaginary space he aspires to but cannot fully inhabit; Jaye Moon reworked Félix González-Torres’s “Perfect Lovers” with a clock face in numerical Braille; the celebrated Mr. repurposed a found snowboard with iconic Japanese manga adolescent couples; quandaries of love are seen through the prism of the omnipotent Picasso; stories in first-person narrative are found in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “Pride and Insouciance.” TRANSPACIFIC: Perfect Lovers takes on the confines of adorning life.

Love Difference, installed in the Hannam district of Seoul with a palette of soft concrete in tandem with stark white walls with rich tonal nuances, presents clashing, flourishing, and playful works with a contemporary edge, a material wonder. While the installation feels ethereal, the format lends itself to a vivid, grand fantasy of love: R.C. Baker uses a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico, in “Holy of Holies,” for which Andy Warhol was credited as the album’s producer; Brandon Ballengée’s “Frameworks of Absence” meticulously embodies the extinct species’ haunting absence; John Cage, a leading figure of the post-war avant-garde, is featured through a set of thirteen Ryoku, created with the principles of an ancient Chinese divination text, the I Ching; going beyond collaboration to a kind of conspiratorial imagination, Laura Bell and Ian Ganassi’s “The Corpses” has evolved into more than two decades of personal and material call-and-response, with a new batch of collages usually in progress or transit; Ru Marshall’s iPhone photo of a bodega in Brooklyn captures fleeting inquiries of interactive perception; Björn Meyer-Ebrecht’s old book covers are raising expectations, holding authority, hiding secrets, and promising a visionary spirit—remnants from the proverbial “junkyard of history”; Jaye Moon’s “Get That Money” uses 9,216 Lego bricks to reconstruct K-Rap lyrics by Okasian into Braille in number codes; in Janet Taylor Pickett’s “The Liminal,” a voice chimes with Manet’s Olympia. TRANSPACIFIC: Love Difference reminds us that love is all-inclusive.

Yooah Park’s “Void in Writing” is installed in the ATRIUM in Hannam. The piece is a sculptural mobile made of laser-cut stainless steel suspended by piano strings, soaring 20 feet tall and cascading to the floor. This monumental presentation intrigues and piques the audience’s desire to walk around and contemplate it, enriching TRANSPACIFIC’s rich tapestry of contemporary art.

TRANSPACIFIC embarks on a tour, cites the intricacies, and amps up the romance, love, and deliberate insouciance. Playing out riotously in the soul and body of each work in myriad ways, the exhibition sets up methodical beats so that every work resonates. The show moves forward in a vibrant, varied way that brings different perspectives to the tenets of the unexpected. With sensuality and drama, Perfect Lovers is the good, the mad, and the quirky brought together into fantastical stories. Love Difference is profoundly thoughtful and cleverly argued. JENNIFER BAAHNG’s inaugural exhibition in Asia, TRANSPACIFIC, is a tale of love, in two cities, in Seoul.

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