Ali Ruffner

Ali Ruffner

Without

2017

Instillation- photographs, shoes, wood

19’ x 1’ x 10'

Whose bodies are allowed to stay? Whose bodies are not? 

Coming on the heels of roundups of undocumented immigrants nationwide, this piece is directly in response to asking follow up questions around the #ADayWithoutAnImmigrant protest. What would life, or these spaces, look like when certain people are removed? Stripping away contextual references and one body from the original photographs creates a parallel world in which the subject becomes the eerie focal point amid otherwise normal, domestic and intimate scenarios. What remains after is not an absent figure, but an intensified figure and an intensified absence.