Lisa Ruyter combines photography, painting and film in large-format paintings of everyday scenes of industry or leisure. She ironically follows a paint-by-numbers palette ignoring the demands of an appropriate color scheme. The photographic origin of her work remains mysteriously decontextualized, and her paintings take on the impression of film stills, reinforced by her titles, which are often borrowed from films or books. The book includes her work from 1998-2004.
If our contemporary experience of the world is a photographically mediated one, Lisa Ruyter denies the visual and emotional depth of that experience in her foreshortened, brightly colored paintings. Taking the 14 traditional Christian Stations of the Cross as an organizational motif, Ruyter pairs a specially commissioned narrative text with her hand-drawn reproductions of news photographs to present a post-9/11 world that she is trying to both understand and rebuke.