Heavier Than Air
Ruby Rumie, Young Girl with Vessel. Photograph by Shael Shapiro. I feel like I don’t even exist. The words floated on the white gallery walls, vanishing quickly. Another sentence followed: Today, I realized I’m not crazy.
It was a loop of pain and rage, without audio; the gut-wrenching words of two hundred women who have been the victims of domestic violence, half in Colombia and half and in New York City, engaged in a ritual to transform their suffering.
For years, Cartagena-born and based artist Ruby Rumié thought about their plight, reading emotional stories in newspapers local to the areas where victims were most often victimized. What happens, she asked herself, when you are frightened or angry? The answer came immediately: You lose your breath.
This was the inspiration for a conceptual art project, , at the Nohra Haime Gallery in Cartagena, and (), a new iteration that was on view at La Mama Galleria on Great Jones Street this October. As an activist artist whose work often focuses on social issues such as gentrification, class, and
