FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Lauren Ruiz

Fresh Relics

Opening Reception: Friday, May 23, 5-7pm 

Exhibition: May 23 - June 22, 2025

MARQUEE PROJECTS is thrilled to announce Fresh Relics, our second solo exhibition of research-based multimedia artist Lauren Ruiz. An opening reception will be held on Friday, May 23 from 5-7pm.

Fresh Relics explores the ancient tradition of relic making: the disinterring, dismembering, and dispersal of saintly bodies as a means of spreading belief and cultivating power. By investigating how this sacred fragmentation transforms human remains into objects of violation, veneration, and control, Ruiz also considers concepts of what is discarded or worshipped within our current culture.

Using layered and disparate materials, including glass, silicone, spray foam, and medical tubing, Ruiz confronts the history of bodily fragmentation not only as spiritual practice, but as clinical intervention and physical trauma. What is preserved, what is lost, and who decides?

To create the soundscape for this work, Ruiz performed and recontextualized the early Christian ritual of collecting martyrs’ tomb dust – hanānā, a sacred practice believed to channel divine intercession by using material traces of the dead for veneration or consumption. For this work, she ingested encapsulated dust gathered from her ancestors’ graves and, using a digital stethoscope, recorded the visceral sounds of her body digesting it. This act directly references the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, but also creates a conversation regarding consumption as a transformative gesture, and issues of personal agency versus institutional control of the human body.

Lauren Ruiz has presented projects at the Latvian National Museum of Art, UC Santa Barbara, UC Berkeley, the 2021 College Art Association Conference, and the 2022 AAH Conference. Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Japan, Canada, the Czech Republic, and Cuba. Ruiz has been a resident artist at the Guerrilla Science’s ArtSci Residency, the Santa Fe Art Institute Revolution Residency and the Museum of the Southwest. Lauren Ruiz lives in Islip Terrace, NY, and has been included in several group shows at MP. She is the Manager of Research and Operations of Future Histories Studio at Stony Brook University.