Ruth Dusseault will show video samples of her work, in addition to discussing her series', Seven-Minute Walden and Play War. Ms. Dusseault works as visiting faculty at Emory University, where she designs special topics courses that merge photography, film, public art and design.

 

Artist Statement

Raised in the shadow of Disney World at the tourist epicenter of Florida, my developmental perception of the universe was that we are all living among an infinite series of theme parks. Later in life, after studying art and architectural theory, I realized there is some truth to this view. Utopian expressions are ubiquitous.  Wherever someone is constructing a world of their own, they are doing it in response to some contemporary condition. If they go to make their vision a reality, they are creating an imprint of the present. Using the camera, I try to enter these worlds at the point where they enter the real world.  Through art, they generate conversation about the historic reality in which we live.

Using photography, video and installation, I have done a series of projects that traverse documentation and abstraction. In the Atlantic Steel Project, I recorded the six-year transformation of an historic industrial site into a "new urban" simulacra of itself. In Modern Nature, I conducted an architectural survey of tourist attractions that interpret nature, followed by another stranger national survey of homemade recreational battlefields called Play War. The installation Seven-Minute Walden is a synthesis of recently collected video materials transposing an historic text onto the contemporary world.  I also curated touring exhibitions that merge art and architecture, and write about photography, film and landscape interpretation.