Since 2012 I have been honoured to be part of a creative collaboration with members of the Behchoko community, in the Tłı̨chǫ region, Northwest Territories of Canada. I work with elders and youth on projects that involve the visualization of regional oral history through participatory design and animation. Films that emerged through this collaboration include The Woman Who Came Back, and an animated version of the peace between Edzo and Akaitcho.
Through this ongoing work, we adhere to the Tłı̨chǫ educational philosophy of being ’strong like two people’. There is strength in bringing together different forms of knowledge (oral and visual), and different generations (elders and youth). This collaboration is based on relationships: between stories and the land, between community and researcher, as well as the past, present and future.
The Woman Who Came Back was screened by (among others) Ethnografilm, Prairie Tales, the Indianer Inuit Festival, and broadcast by Arte Television in Germany and France. A trailer for the film is included in this section. The film can be seen at the Tłı̨chǫ Research & Training Institute website.
The opening images in this section show a recent project titled: Activity for the creation of a relational object (find the place where your heart is bursting with love for every living being in the world). This installation emerged from instructions that I wrote for a participatory activity—involving the cutting and linking of multiple pieces of board to form a complex constellation. The work draws from the Fluxus tradition of the event score. The instructions provide a starting point for an open-ended, hands-on interpretation that allows for countless iterations—making use of everyday material and resulting in a malleable sculptural form that can be scaled and adapted to countless environments. This project was exhibited at the SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL in July, 2025. Included in this section are gallery images as well as an iteration in which video is projected onto the installation.
Activity for the creation of a relational object (find the place where your heart is bursting with love for every living being in the world): Instructions
1. Cut a rectangle from a new or used board at a 1:1.618 ratio (or other ratio).
2. Cut a separate board in the same ratio—scaled down so its length equals the height of the first rectangle.
3. Cut a minimum of three more rectangles by repeating the same proportional reduction.
4. Cut two narrow openings in each board.
5. Link multiple boards through the openings.
6. Use string to fasten a bundle of multiple boards.
7. Use string to suspend from a ceiling.
8. Repeat steps 1 to 7 to form a constellation.
Additional projects in this section include Cycles. This work consists of a machined steel piece (used in the oil extraction industry in Alberta) and dirt. Drawing from the modernist tradition of the found object, this item was removed from the life cycle of industrial production and recontextualized as artwork. Exhibited at the SAIC Open Studio event, July 2024
The bottom imagery is Remembering and Forgetting. As part of this installation a narrow slit was cut into various panels—allowing light to be projected onto and through multiple surfaces. The footage presents, among other things, images of family, as well as meaningful geographical locations that are seemingly ordinary but of historical significance. The installation is made of six 20 × 20 inch fabric panels (mixed fibres and linen, including fragments of the artist’s clothing) dipped in liquified candle wax. The footage is digitized 16mm and digital video. An early version of this work was exhibited at the SAIC Open Studio event, July 2024.
Horizontes is an accordion fold book conveying a young girl's experience of working on a farm in southern Spain during the late 1950s. The book is held in the Joan Flasch Artists' Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It is designed as a back-to-back accordion fold, ink jet and screen printed, 6 × 3.5 inches, edition of 6. Situated in a coastal location, the story describes a sense of curiosity and reverie elicited by the ocean. The account is based on an oral story told by the artist's mother and includes a reflection on how narratives from the past evoke new meaning in the present.
The other set of images are of Shelter Within a Shelter (currently at the prototype stage). This work explores ideas about refuge by referencing, among other things, Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard.
As part of my exploration of entanglement I create landscapes and maps through various strategies, such as mind mapping, rhizomatic expansion, and drawing techniques that meld lived experience with poetic visuals.
This first work is titled 3:5. It is a drawing that expands through the ongoing addition of new panels (each is 17 x 14 inches). This project was exhibited at the SAIC Open Studio event, July 2024.
The second image is A section from A Brief History of Meaning-making on Gaia (2008-present). This work is rendered using ink on canvas (140 x 53 inches). This project resembles a large-scale mind map and is derived from philosophy, scholarship as well as community-based research and teaching. Through this artwork I reflect on the quality of dialogue, exchange of knowledge, and sharing of ideas that emerges from collective mind mapping—a valuable experience through which to visualize entanglements and relationality. This project was exhibited at the SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL in July, 2025.
The third image is Energy Flows: Memory, Reciprocity and the Borderlands. This work is rendered using graphite, watercolour, collage, and fabric (144 x 48 inches). This project was exhibited at the SAIC Galleries, Chicago, IL in July, 2025.
Between 2019 and 2020 I led an arts-based research project with the Edmonton Multicultural Coalition (EMC). This year-long collaboration revolved around the creation of intercultural dialogue through participatory strategies.
Multiple customized activities emerged through this work, including Making a Home: a collective model-making exercise in which participants worked together to create small-scale models of homes that meet personal, family, and cultural needs. The material outcomes of this activity provided an embodiment of life stories, lived experiences, and ideas about family that resulted in meaningful dialogue at the EMC.
Additional imagery in this section includes a data collection tool kit (used during the early stages of research), as well as The Friendship Game—custom-designed for the sharing of memories and stories between members of Edmonton’s diverse ethno-cultural communities.
Through practice‐based research on Tlicho lands (in Canada's Northwest Territories), drawing is being used to embody intangible cultural heritage (which includes activities such as oral history and the social practice of walking). Work emerging from this research includes co-created artwork, and several animated films—including the experimental short film, Lines—made of 900 graphite drawings. The process of rendering these drawings embodied experiences on the land that are repetitive, albeit transformative, such as walking or listening to multiple versions of a single story. The entanglement of continually moving lines, evident through the animation, provides a counter‐narrative to colonial interpretations of the land—particularly narratives constructed through Cartesian coordinate systems (on which computer graphics and the geometry of built environments are based). Through this project line‐making provides a trace of memory, rhythmic movement and epistemology.
Lines toured in the United States as part of the 2018 Black Maria Film Festival. Lines was also presented at the 2016 IJADE Conference at the University of Chester in England. An article about the making of this film, Transformation through Repetition: Walking, Listening and Drawing on Tlicho Lands, was published in the peer reviewed International Journal of Art & Design Education.
Recent research activity, writing and presentations have emerged through engagement with design futures (in the realm of education). I am part of the Disparate Cultures and World Viewpoints workgroup—part of the Future of Design Education initiative. I have also presented and published through the Futures of Design Education SIG within the Design Research Society. Ideas explored through these initiatives relate to pluriversality, ontological design, land-based pedagogy, and participatory methods for community-based work.
Whirlwind is a hand-drawn animation, consisting of over 700 ink drawings, rendered during the early stages of the 2020 global pandemic. The process of drawing this film, frame by frame, coincided with a unique sense of time and space that emerged at the time. Influenced by early twentieth century animation, this film attempts to visualize new rhythms of life emerging during a time of rapid sociocultural change—shifting away from carefully controlled perspectives and vanishing points, while depicting a constant sense of movement and transformation.
Whirlwind received a Director’s Choice Award as part of the 2021 Thomas Edison Film Festival, Best Animated Short at the 2020 Gotta Minute Film Festival. Additional screenings include 2021 Revolutions Per Minute Festival, Defy Film Festival, 2022 Video Art and Experimental Film Festival in NYC, and The Wold’s Best Self-funded Films section of Cine Pobre, 2022.
The first two images in this section are from the short film, Meditations. This an animated short that revolves around a psychotherapy session set in a dystopian future. The film received a Director’s Choice Award at the 2024 Thomas Edison Film Festival, and will also be screened at the Juggernaut Sci-Fi & Fantasy Film Festival, and the Philip K Dick Film Festival (at the Museum of the Moving Image, NYC). As part of the Boston Science Fiction Film Festival, Meditations was positively reviewed by The Tufts Daily (under the Csilla section).
The video below is Futures Within—a 1 minute film screened in 2021 at the Gotta Minute Film Festival, Minute Madness Toronto, and at the Norwescon Speculative Film Fest in Seattle.
Ruiz, A. & Strickfaden, M. (2016) Light in the Borderlands: A Film Created by Three Legally Blind Urban Explorers. In: Devlieger, P., Strickfaden, M., Brown, S. & Miranda-Galarza, B. (Editors). Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Societies. Antwerpen: Garant Publishers.
Ruiz, A. (2014). Critical Design and the Social Construction of the Urban Landscape. In: Rowe, A., and Sadler Takach, B., eds. 2014: Design Education: Approaches, Explorations and Perspectives. Edmonton: Department of Art & Design, University of Alberta.
Descriptions of legal blindness, as lived experience—involving continual movement between the world of sightedness and blindness—are largely absent within medical models of disability. In an effort to challenge depictions of blindness as pathology, researchers in this project worked with participants who are legally blind, on a co-created film, exploring built spaces in the city of Edmonton, Canada.
Participants in this research shared stories while recording their movement through a shopping mall, an art gallery, and a gym. Through this project, participants often took the lead, determining the content and context of urban journeys. Stories and images shared through this collaboration suggest that legal blindness is an alternative way of knowing the world, with unique perceptual experiences, and navigational strategies.
This research was developed with members of the CNIB, and Dr. Megan Strickfaden from the Department of Human Ecology at the University of Alberta. Results have been published in Rethinking Disability: World Perspectives in Culture and Society (by Garant in Antwerp, Belgium), and by Societies: Spatial Explorations and Digital Traces: Experiences of Legal Blindness through Filmmaking.
In this section I include images of films created over the last decade.
The first video is Inscriptions—a short experimental 16mm film (presented live, using two projectors) at a public art event in Edmonton—hosted by Mile Zero Dance. The film is a piecing together of 16mm footage I shot in different countries, capturing imagery of urban landscapes, places of work, and family. In making Inscriptions, the surface of the developed film was altered through scratching, acrylic pigment and dry transfer lettering. This transformation of the film surface embodies the role of "forgetting" in the "formation of a new identity" as described by Paul Connerton in his writing on "cultural memory."
The following image is from Tangible Memory (screened at the 2022 Athens Film + Video Festival). This short film is based on conversations with (and footage of) a veteran machinist who reflects on a lifetime of working with metal. Through the sharing of memories and storytelling this brief account sheds light on the intimate, life-long relation between maker and material (and the degree to which the latter has agency). As people shape material, material also shapes people. The medium used to capture this footage (using a Bolex 16mm camera in an industrial work environment) further reinforces the significance of tools and tactility in shaping things.
Subsequent pictures are from the short film, Sand, which was screened as part of the 2019 Hispanic Culture Film Festival in St. Augustine, Florida. Footage was shot in southern Spain and the Alberta Badlands.
