Alison Ruttan

Alison Ruttan, Line in The Sand/Highway of Death, Installation view, cast ceramic vehicles, wood, sand, brick, plastic bags, 12' x 32', 2013–4. Alison Ruttan (born 1954) is an American interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates human behaviors such as appetite, sexuality and aggression and the degree to which they are governed by biology or social conditioning. She has explored diverse media from animation to photography to installation and drawn on fields from primatology to social theory, creating work that ranges from light-hearted gender critique to sobering meditation on war. Ruttan has exhibited individually at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Three Arts Club of Chicago and Monique Meloche Gallery, and in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Drawing Center, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Apexart and Minneapolis Institute of Art, among many venues. Flash Art, Art Papers, Sculpture, and New Art Examiner, as well as in major newspapers, magazines, and television and radio outlets. In addition to her art career, Ruttan has taught at several Chicago institutions, most notably the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been based in Chicago with her husband, artist Scott Stack, since 1990.

Life and career Ruttan was born in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1954, but grew up in several places, including Washington D.C., California, and the Philippines, among many. After completing high school in the Twin Cities, Minnesota-area, Ruttan studied photography at the University of Michigan (BFA, 1976), training that continues to inform her aesthetic.

In 1990, Ruttan enrolled in the graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) to study painting. Her inquiries lead her to diverse disciplines (primatology, evolutionary biology, feminism, political science, history) and often-new media that she chooses to best physically manifest the narrative she is structuring. Her practice can be divided into two thematic categories involving human drives, each with distinct bodies of work: 1) Inquiries into food and sex; and 2) Inquiries into aggression and war. Alison Ruttan, bippity Bop, digitally created video animation (stills), 2000.

Inquiries into sex and appetite Ruttan's early work explored appetite and desire and their relationship to social norms and excess, employing various media. Critic Susan Snodgrass wrote that her "diverse oeuvre" playfully questioned "the entangled relationship of sexuality, consumption, censorship and taboo." Alan Artner, however, encountered "a plethora of good ideas" whose connection he found elusive. Ruttan first gained widespread attention for her "Dough Girls" (1994–5): bread dough sculptures cast from a mold of a women's bottom and baked in pairs of women's underwear; critics noted in them an amusing, uneasy mingling of "wholesome and abject" associations. In works from her "Food" series (1996–98), such as Sweet Potatoe Pie, Ruttan appropriated pornographic images and then strategically obscured them with circular "cut-outs" of gourmet food magazines, creating tantalizing compositions that denied easy comprehension and satisfaction of either drive. The double projection Chromophilia (2001) likewise featured bright, pulsing abstract shapes that resembled paper-doll cutouts or Matisse dancers. The shapes flickered in and out of recognizable sexual activity—scored to excerpts from The Nutcracker—creating an effect that critic Margaret Hawkins described as "Fantasia meets Fritz the Cat". Facing videos show a cat pacing the perimeter of a room and a man mimicking the cat; the disparity between the innateness of the cat's actions and the man's mimicry reinforces how embodied behavior is.

Primate works In 2004, Ruttan became interested in evolutionary biology and primates—humanity's nearest biological relatives—as a means of understanding humans. Her mixed-media drawings, Individuation in Bonobo Grooming Habits (2006), documented her discovery (in three different communities) that bonobos in captivity express themselves through distinct, individual "hair styles." The series slyly compares species, while entertaining the idea that habits of individuation and self-adornment might represent, like toolmaking, legitimate intelligent behavior involving socialization. "Fringe Dwellers" (2007) stemmed from bonobos' endangered species status; Ruttan photographed them in human spaces, imagining them as an immigrant group struggling to integrate into human culture. Her "Bred in the Bone" works (2008) paired videos and photographs of primate social interactions that she shot at Wild Animal Park with like images of people in order to problematize assumptions of human rationality.

Ruttan's research eventually took her to the work of primatologist Jane Goodall. She was fascinated by the account of an unexplained, deadly civil war within a once-peaceable chimpanzee troupe, seeing in it an "origin story" of humanity's own history of warfare. Ruttan's inquiry and previous work led to the epic series, The Four Year War at Gombe (2009–12), seventy-five photographs and three videos in which she choreographed and filmed a reenactment of the primate war using family, friends and neighbors. Critics and curators described them, variously, as uncanny, disorienting, "eerily beautiful, and graphic in their depiction," noting how Ruttan's material and formal choices complicated the work's reception.

Recognition Ruttan has been recognized with artist residencies at Wild Animal Park (Escondido, California, 2005) and Krems, Austria (2015), and an Art & Technology Residency at Wexner Center for the Arts (2004). She has received awards from the Illinois Arts Council (1993, 1996, 2002), School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997, 2000), Jerome Foundation (1981–2), and Minnesota State Arts Board (1980). Her work is in several public collections, including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Arts, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Daniel Levinas Collection, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Gamson Art Collection, and University of California, Riverside.