Talking Fields

SOCO Gallery

The series of photographs included in Talking Fields were created during Ruiz’s 2024 summer residency at the McColl Center and were taken in various locations across North Carolina. The series is inspired by engravings made by the ancestors of Cherokee culture in Western North Carolina, a continuation of Ruiz’s artistic research searching for ancient petroglyphs made in Chile and Mexico. Ruiz began his research with the archaeological site of Judaculla Rock in Jackson county: a curvilinear-shaped outcrop of soapstone known for its over 1,500 ancient carvings and petroglyphs, which are believed to have been created by Cherokee ancestors around 1,500 years ago.

The artist’s project traces a relationship between the technology of petroglyphs and the technology of photography as two parallel systems for representing reality in different epochs. Ruiz’s work explores the possibilities of “writing” on the fields as a way to mark the landscape, considering that in addition to marking space, these forms of communication are also significant markers of time, much in the same manner as ancient engravings. Following the phrase of Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, "one who transcribes extends the writing and reveals its always unfinished character, always about to be born", Ruiz proposes his symbols as “lightglyphs,” markers of time and space in the landscape in the form of light.

For They Plant the Seeds, Ruiz traveled to Ranlo, a small town in Gaston County, North Carolina. Here the artist found a scenic landscape full of Kudzu (Pueraria lobata), or "Kuzu" as it is known in Japan for the first time. Introduced to the United States in 1876 as part of the Japanese pavilion at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, it now invades the forests of the South where it runs rampant. His “lightglyphs” create Ruiz’s own mark on the landscape while the Kudzu ties it indefinitely to the Southeast.