Gabriela Ruiz

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Gabriela Ruiz's practice detonates across sculpture, performance, digital media, and painting, conjuring worlds where synthetic color burns hotter than flesh, plastic gleams with menace, and fantasy collapses beneath its own artifice. She insists that fantasy, double-edged though it may be, remains a critical survival tool. Hailing from the San Fernando Valley, Ruiz draws equally from consumer culture, carnival architectures, and class stratifications. Forged in queer nightlife, her work bears the imprint of the rave working class she helped shape in downtown Los Angeles. She weaponizes color—deploying toxic pinks and irradiated greens alongside plastics and chrome—mobilizing maximalist semiotics, camp not as parody but as prophecy. Her installations do not simply reflect volatility; they orchestrate it through glitching screens, voyeuristic cameras, fractured video, and unstable architectures, folding viewers into circuits of spectacle where pleasure, exhaustion, and surveillance entwine.

Artwork