RUBY McCOLLISTER

"SW"

January 14th - February 5th, 2023

 

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Why are we here? And do we answer that call?

 

In a world of opening eyes, a mass awakening and outrage over what we find has been there all along, we, the children, are being called to live out our purpose.

 

Ruby McCollister paints fragments, emotions, clutched décallotage, symbols and digestions of Snow White. Ruby’s Snow is depicted over and over again with the uncanny inaccuracy of fan art. Disney’s original characters can sometimes rupture a childhood memory, causing a PTSD-induced nausea. Those institutionalized images can be a depressant. But seeing free-style, public reproductions of the characters, while driving past our preschool wall or scrolling through colored pencil tumblrs, aches like loss. They push the mind to its edge where we teeter between the source material’s paradigm and its collapse. These false idols are motivational.

 

The difference between the factory-produced image and the fan’s devotional representation is the distance between this plane and the realm where we can be with the cartoons. This inbetween could be a secret infinite nook where reality actual-ly is, where women come from and remain.

 

What is a woman? She’s an it. She’s a girl. She’s an It Girl. So, a woman is a question, rather. Did Disney know what he was doing when he begged the question, “Snow White?”

 

Ruby’s will, or a will much greater than hers, has brought Snow White to the surface of her consciousness. She came, no doubt, from a deep, long and unknowable dormancy, aka a lineage. Ruby would answer SW and open a door that allows a small leak from the real world into this one. Snow White wallpapers Ruby’s mind and now her paintings cover sacred Gaylord walls. Her paintings could be a map she has channeled, or the channel itself. Either way, she is the chosen one, the steward and a docent of these parts, the girls’ images and their meaning.

 

Us girls from LA, we grow up in a small giant town that’s quiet, dangerous, hard to get around and easy to get lost in. It’s a place filled with inbetween, where the spirits, our ancestors, can chase us down. Some of us refuse the call for long periods of our lives. One answers it with her entire being.

 

Ruby

 

Her name is a call unto us.

 

Ruby

 

-Text by Casey Jane Ellison