AIDA RUILOVA
Aida Ruilova, a video artist and musician whose work will be featured in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, creates short video loops out of discrete sounds — a breath, the screeching sound of a vinyl record being scratched, a muttered phrase — which are edited in counterpoint to images of characters performing mysterious, often uncomfortable acts. Her “gothic aesthetic” is inspired, in part, by camp and B-movie horror and vampire flicks of the 1970s.
“Ruilova’s looping video in six parts shows people crawling, drooling, laying in bed, gasping orgasmically, scraping records against floors and stone walls,” writes Michael Waxman in his review of the exhibition Strange Days. “The videos, admittedly influenced by the vampire films of French horror auteur Jean Rollin, signal a descent into discontinuity that manages to eke out an often heartening caprice that are the films’ sole consistency.”
“If Kafka were alive, he’d be a fan,” adds Regina Hackett about Ruilova’s 1999 video You’re Pretty, which features “a stringy male hugging a sound box in an empty loft and muttering the title into his ragged beard, over and over. As a diversion, he scraps LP’s against a wall, savoring the sound of destroying them.”
“The rapid jump-cuts in her short videos either combine music or allude to musical sounds, creating narratives that are strangely familiar yet steeped in obscure symbolism,” writes Sylvia Chivaratanond about Ruilova’s exhibition at the Prague Bienniale. “Her interest in music lies in the gap between the audio and the visual, at times forcing the viewer to ‘visualize’ sound.”
Originally from Wheeling, West Virginia, New York-based Ruilova studied at the School of Visual Arts and at the University of South Florida. In the early ’90s, she formed the alternative music group Alva with Liza Wakeman and Michelle Anderson.
