“This Must Be The Place” is a solo exhibition by Detroit-based artist Ellen Rutt that opens to the public on July 20 as part of Detroit Art Week 2019. Presented during the city’s official night of gallery openings, the exhibition features a new series of “place paintings” and unfolds within the broader context of Detroit Art Week, situating the work in direct dialogue with the city’s cultural and environmental landscape.
The exhibition calls attention to the interconnectivity of the earth’s complex systems through a process-driven body of work made by tracing elements and textures from the physical environment. By working outside in public spaces, Rutt allows often-overlooked aspects of architecture and landscape to dictate each composition. This physical engagement with place positions the project in close conversation with the urgency of climate action and the lived experience of navigating contemporary environments.
The paintings reflect the complexity of modern society and the natural world, examining questions of access and belonging. Improvisational mark-making gathered from each site lays the groundwork for the compositions, later masked by contained shapes that create layered tensions between control and chaos. The resulting works often read as collages of clean and messy, textural and flat color blocks—visual dichotomies that echo the paradoxes present in both human-made and natural systems. Through this approach, Rutt confronts her own contradictions in order to imagine futures rooted in social justice rather than green capitalism.
Ellen Rutt (b Detroit, MI 1989) is a queer Detroit-based painter, quilter and social practice artist. Through the intersecting disciplines of her practice, she investigates the complex relationships between place, process, material and movement to create active and embodied images, objects, and experiences.
As a multidisciplinary artist, her work is rooted in the core belief that art enables discovery and transformation and can be a pathway toward more equitable, regenerative communal futures.
