Christian Ruiz Berman
If life is a vast broth of entangled actions, making art is how I
chart my way through the soup. Having been removed from my
homeland of Mexico at a young age, I became accustomed to
localizing my identity at the crossroads of memory, fact, and
fiction. My work draws from personal histories of migration and
adaptation. I consider my work meditative in that it strives to
dissect and understand the components of my experience and my
cultural and aesthetic legacy in a way that might give a greater
understanding of the whole. While I use symbols, architectures,
and snippets of stories that are personal, I want my paintings
to embody a shared experience. Part of this experience is the
struggle between the homogenizing power of globalization and
the innate human desire to assert one’s uniqueness. What is the
role of the tribal and artisanal in a society where the click of a
button can connect you to the rest of the world, and global media
conglomerates dictate the cultural norms of millions?