Photo by Monique Atherton
Artist Statement
As a lens based artist, I use both digital and analog photography as foundational tools to explore indecipherable emotional landscapes and buried memories shaped by my experience growing up Pentecostal from ages 6 to 16, and living with bipolar disorder. From this foundation, I use unconventional processes—altering analog photographs using experimental darkroom techniques, or transforming digital images into woodcuts, serigraphs, and drawings. These mediums allow me to mimic my personal unraveling internal dialogue of mental illness and past memory. I make work to speak to myself: to someone I once was, and a future potential self, in a language only she can decipher first. I listen for her voice, and I learn her language from watching the development of the work itself. The outcome of this process finds itself out to be destroying, distorting, and remaking the image, serving as an artifact of my experience.
For questions, inquires, or comments, please contact me at
ruby [at] lunch money print [dot] com
ruby [at] lunch money print [dot] com
Bio
Ruby Gonzalez Hernandez (she/her) is an Indigenous Zapotec artist, educator, and curator born on Quinnipiac land (New Haven, Connecticut). As a lens-based artist, she uses photography as a foundation to trace memory, buried emotion, and the process of making meaning from recovered personal history. She is passionate about work that serves the New Haven arts community, and grassroots arts ecology. Ruby is the founder of Fair-Side, a community of practice for artists. Her work has been supported and recognized by the National Basketball Association, Facing History and Ourselves, United Way, the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, The National Endowment for the Arts, and more. In her curatorial practice, she organizes exhibitions concerning themes and ideas surrounding community solidarity.
