Alison Ruttan @ Riverside Arts Center

Create from Ruins: A Review of Alison Ruttan’s “Falling to Pieces” at Riverside Arts Center

October 20, 2024 – November 30, 2024

Motivated by a desire to repurpose materials and push against the traditions of the medium, several contemporary ceramic artists, such as Yee Soo-kyung and Bouke de Vries, are integrating discarded and shattered wares into their sculptures and installations. Chicago artist Alison Ruttan takes things a step further by actively “damaging” her ceramic pieces while they’re in progress to create exquisite and haunting miniature reproductions of buildings in ruin. Ruttan’s project is not concerned with material excess or convention but rather with human nature—more specifically, our species’ propensity for violence, toward other human beings as well as the planet.

Although it’s impossible not to associate Ruttan’s mangled buildings with recent images of devastation in Gaza, Ukraine and Appalachia, or even blighted areas in the deindustrialized Midwest, her work is not tied to a particular building, location or event (a non-specificity reinforced by her generic and laconic titles, like “A Library” or “Blue Fragment”). The architectural style the artist mimics—blocky modernism stripped of ornamentation—is prevalent in cities throughout the world. Similarly, the rooftops comprising “Rising Water,” a work-in-progress that will be exhibited in full at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2026, are commonplace in suburbia. Instead, the sculptures function as archetypes of destruction past, present and, dreadfully, future.

Time’s passage manifests in stunning fashion in “A Neighborhood,” a sprawling sculpture installed at the center of the gallery’s back room. Positioned on four partially nested tables that step down in height, the sculpture shows the sequence of a neighborhood’s obliteration, moving from intact walls to pancaked floors to blasted bits of debris. The methodical, descending progression of destruction conveys not only the completeness of the act but also our seeming inability to stop the chain of events that set the devastation in motion—analogous to an object that has no choice but to drop from a higher to a lower position due to the force of gravity.

Ruttan’s decision to use clay to create “A Neighborhood” (and all her sculptures) grounds the work, giving it both physical heft to match the gravity of her subject matter and connecting it to a form of human expression that stretches back 30,000 years. By choosing a highly tactile material to draw attention to the consequences of humanity’s violent impulses, Ruttan aims to combat the desensitization we experience as images of war, hurricanes, wildfires and abandonment flow ceaselessly across our screens. On a fundamental level, the clay reorients our attention to its imperiled source: the earth.

This reorientation does not occur without friction, because Ruttan’s destroyed buildings and neighborhoods are exceptionally beautiful as sculptural objects. Far removed from the chaos, it’s easy for us to aestheticize the ruins at the expense of comprehending and acknowledging our culpability.

But if we’re being completely honest with ourselves, we’ll admit what we most powerfully react to and remember is Ruttan’s artistic mastery: the colors and textures of her alluring glazes that look like soot, mold or melted wax in some works and oily liquids in others; the granular level of detail in her architecture and ruins; her preternatural ability to transform a lump of sticky soil into something we’d eagerly display in our homes.

Just as there exists the capacity for cruelty and violence in the human brain, so too does the capacity for expression, communication and empathy. We destroy, but we also create. The challenge is finding a way to tip the scales, for good, in favor of the latter.

(Published in Newcity, November 18, 2024)