Liz Ruest
Digital Mixed Media
Location: 323 Alexander, #214. Easiest to meet me at the back of the building. Let me know you’re coming, then look for the bright silver door opposite 329 Railway St.
Virtual option: if getting to the studio is tricky, or if you’d like to see me work with layers, as shown above, I’m happy to do an online studio visit.
E-mail: info@lizruest.com
Website: https://www.lizruest.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lizruest/
I’ve been living in the Pacific Northwest since 1989. Brought to the West Coast by technology, I stayed for the weather, mountains, and water — an improvement over Ontario!
My work studies locales both homeward and away, and all the choices made over previous generations that brought us to this place and time. Sense of place is a core theme, often navigating the relationship between geography and genealogy. There is not always an obvious horizon line or comforting tree. I intentionally layer images to push away from specificity and disrupt what is too familiar. The dialogue within a series is more about a subtle and significant idea than an exact moment.
I use direct photography or scans of found elements, but more abstractly, I rely on notation, scanned or made, and cartography, to evoke those considered decisions and chosen directions. Another constant I lean on is a healthy dose of texture. I’m always on the lookout for it with my camera – I gasp when I see it in the wild, try multiple methods to recreate it in the studio, and think everything is better with at least a little of it, to reference that sense of time passing.
The presentation of my work is largely digital, yet is composed of the corporeal and concrete, rendered with photography, physical printmaking, encaustic monoprints, and collage. And then it comes back to a physical state when I commit it to a substrate. I love the complexity of that journey!
