Again—and again: on the recent work of Alan Ruiz

As building sites proliferate with relentless rapidity (New York City being but one instance), they punctuate the cityscape as tangible manifestations of ideological agendas aimed at diminishing public access to comfort, to safety, to light, while ensconcing these actual necessities within luxury designations. For Alan Ruiz, it’s the repetitive structuring of the conditions of proliferation, separation, and isolation, along with the illusion of transparency that enables them to function, that constitutes the basis of his practice. It’s within the structure and language of the built environment, and the architectural codes that produce it, that Ruiz embeds his gestures as forms.

Distinct sites may be seen as existing within a continuum of constructed moments that reveal their actual mechanisms only through this very repetition, this accumulation. In Ruiz’s Western Standards series, systems of construction are evidenced in the form of aluminum or steel building studs, put into overdrive by exceeding the standard incremental ratio of stud to space, their accelerated placement suggesting a hyper-deployment of the architectural objectives of containment and division. Ruiz uses computer-generated algorithms to determine the pattern of the repeating vertical elements, mirroring a murky mix of calculation and abandon that might be said to characterize the effects of power on and within a city, a building, a crowd, or a body.

To experience Ruiz’s installation Precincts (2015), which occupied a diminutive glass storefront in the West Village located within steps of an NYPD precinct, or Organizational Transparency (2016), composed of a semi-transparent, reflective film layered over a suite of ground-level windows at Queens Museum, mirroring and deflecting at once the interior of the Museum and the iconic former site of the World’s Fair, is to recognize that the immediate context of these works completes them. These are not autonomous forms. In the first iteration of Organizational Transparency, installed at Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side, the reflective film covered only a single window, in contrast to the installation at Queens Museum, where Ruiz mimicked the full effect of his institutional subject’s formidable presence by covering an uninterrupted swath of windows. In the Abrons installation, the single window was distinguished as one window among several. The band of windows on the building’s concave façade was visibly punctuated—to greater or lesser degree due to the shifting conditions of light—by this one glass panel reflecting differently. The singular panel, with its distinction, was able to cast an air of suspicion across the building and its adjacent neighborhood, summoning both surveillance and speculation as dual forces of urban organization.

The innumerable effects of privatization, visible in the stunningly expeditious accumulation of exclusive space, produce new forms of control while leaving in their wake the somewhat tattered remnants of existing conditions and older disciplines, which may live on partially—even fully at times—despite the totalizing ambitions that engulf them. By pinpointing transformation, Ruiz’s work creates discursive forms, forms that, while residing physically in a static state, set in motion a series of active propositions concerning the flux of spatial and social conditions that constitute the work’s environment and its larger frame of meaning.