Thank you for having me in your studio here in Rome. A studio is never just a room: it's where everything happens, where the work becomes possible. So let's start from here. How does it feel to have built a space of your own to create in? And what are the things that can't be missing, the ones that turn four walls into your space?
It feels amazing to have a space to make art. Now I have a place to interpret what's going on in my life. For the last year, I've been in transition, moving from the US to Italy, so I've had to work really small and keep everything in a suitcase. Having a dedicated space to make allows me to separate myself from everything else going on in my life, or at least interpret it. In my studio, there have to be pictures of art you love and of your own work, things you can look at and feel proud of, feel inspired by. And pictures of art from people you know personally.
I haven't done it yet in this space, but my dad made a lot of art, and my grandmother made a lot of art, and I usually have their work up everywhere. I like to see the family history of making. It keeps you motivated: you feel like you're carrying on a tradition, honoring the people who came before you by doing something they also did. You're engaging in this shared moment across time.
Your surname, Rutz, carries an entire history within it: migration, the Holocaust, names altered to sound "more American." You've described yourself as the archivist of your family, the one who collected and kept the stories that survived. I'm curious when you realized that this role, being the keeper of memory, wasn't something separate from your work, but actually was the work itself.
I'm not sure it's entirely about the work itself, at least not right now, but I realized I've always been deeply interested in archiving my family history. I used to steal photographs from my grandmother and organize them into binders, and I still flip through them a lot. When I was younger, I did it almost habitually, trying to figure out what was going on in my past: who was related to who, what they were doing, where they were living.
I even brought one of those binders with me when I moved: photographs of family members, the date of each one when I could find it, notes from going around and asking everyone who was who, trying to put it all together.
But what stays with me, and I think it's something that runs through my work now, are the gaps. The loss of all those stories. If I could make a wish, one of them would be to sit with my family and hear what they lived through, especially the ones who immigrated. I'd love to hear those stories, because I think they're stories of bravery and perseverance.
Staying with that feeling of loss and the need to hold onto things, there's something else that runs through your work, impossible to miss: a sense of urgency. Not as a stated theme, but as a texture. It lives in the fluorescent colors, in the figures that drip and dissolve, in the objects caught mid-explosion. Is that urgency something you let surface on its own, or something you build deliberately into the composition?
Anxiety and urgency feed each other, but anxiety has this way of taking over completely. It feels toxic, like something you have to get out of your body. When there's no negative space on the canvas, you can sense the anxiety: that suffocation, everything moving around you with no way out. It's a pretty faithful rendering of how generalized anxiety feels sometimes. When my professor said I had a "fear of empty space on the canvas", she was probably right, but it was less a formal choice and more a necessity. I needed to project that sense of constriction somewhere. The color shifted too. Seattle pushed me toward darker tones, burnt umber, cooler shadows, a palette that matched that intimate, slightly gloomy mood. Now I'm looking for something different. I want the work to breathe more and have more balance, to hold space for other states like hope, euphoria, and nostalgia. It feels like a natural evolution, though I'm still figuring out what that looks like.
That sense of urgency seems to connect to something larger in the way you see the world, and this is the part of your work I find most original. You come from landscape architecture: sewage systems, rain cycles, root networks, commuting routes. And you read human suffering through those same systems, through the way they function, or break down. You've said it yourself: when a street is poorly designed, the system stops working, and a person in crisis mirrors that same dysfunction. When did you first realize that a badly designed street and a person falling apart were telling the same story?
Around the time I was learning landscape architecture, I was also falling apart. It was the worst time I'd ever had, my first year of grad school, and I started to see the relationship between the two things.
I think I had not knowingly, but had already started to develop this relationship with the environment and the landscape that was mimicking things around me. Mostly, when I would think back to being on the beach when I was younger, or when I would see big areas of land getting chopped down in my hometown, it would make me cry, and it would make me feel this intense anxiety. Every time I saw it I would get this visceral physical reaction to it.
Later, I volunteered at a children's hospital in the garden; I helped maintain the gardens. And when I was there I was always kind of weeding by myself, and you would see families from the hospital, or doctors, or just people come outside and sit there. I was looking at them from afar and I could see their relationship to the landscape and how much it really helped them, how much it spoke to them. You could see it in the way they were sitting, the way they were looking. That landscape was working well, and it healed people in that moment.
I think that maybe also helped me start to build that relationship in my mind.
That physical, bodily relationship to the world shows up in the work too: in the figures especially. They're almost always deformed, in mutation, at times monstrous, and yet never gratuitous. There's a tenderness inside the horror. How do you work along that edge, so that a face communicates suffering without ever tipping into the merely grotesque?
It was probably accidental! Because one thing I noticed, when I started showing my work to other people, I was really surprised by how disturbing they found it, or, like, unpleasant. It felt fine to me, normal, or something like that. Maybe not entirely normal…but it wasn't disturbing to me. I'm inspired by some cartoons from my childhood. A lot of people say my work reminds them of Courage the Cowardly Dog. I watched that show even though it scared me. I watched one called Flapjack, or SpongeBob! On SpongeBob, you know, there were these moments in the cartoon where suddenly there would be a close-up of something really gross, like SpongeBob's crusty eyes. And it was so detailed, and it was clearly a painting! And I loved those shots. I was really drawn to things like dark eye circles, moles, decaying things, or garbage. And it didn't feel disturbing to me; it felt very aesthetic. So I don't know if there was a conscious intent behind it.
Let's move to a specific work, because I think it brings a lot of these threads together. Dinner with Death Omens feels almost like a contemporary reading of Leonardo's Last Supper: figures gathered around a table at the moment everything is about to change, each one reacting in their own way. But here the table is loaded with a whole language of omens: the upside-down bread, the charred egg, the falling corpse candle. There's something almost scholarly behind these symbols. How did you find these forgotten systems of foreboding, and how are they articulated across the scene? How does each omen speak to the figure beside it, and to the painting as a whole?
That's one of my favorite paintings. At the time, I thought I was going to do a series about people eating at tables. Though I wasn't inspired by The Last Supper, I was more inspired by The Potato Farmers, by Van Gogh.
At the time, I was also reading this book called The Book of Useless Information, and sometimes it would talk about omens. I was really curious about the relationship between omens and death, and how people would look for signs of whether it was going to happen through food or random things. So I wanted to do a dinner scene, and if you look in the back, you can kind of see some hidden figures. I did that because I wanted it to be unclear whether the people at the dinner were dead or not yet. And each of the faces is supposed to be a response to knowing you're going to die, or thinking about your death. One person has a knife going towards their throat, but looks almost happy about it, someone welcoming death. Someone hiding under the table is hiding from death. Someone banging on the table is angry, trying to command the situation and take control. But when they do it, they flip over the cake, which is also an omen that you're going to die soon.
We've spent a lot of time decoding the details, but I'd like to step back to the whole. Beneath all the systems and symbols, do you think your work carries a moral: something it's quietly arguing for, or against? Or would you resist that word entirely, and say the work is meant to be felt rather than concluded?
I think it's hard to create a story without a little bit of a moral. Maybe people interpret it differently, but you yourself have something you're trying to say. Behind a lot of my work, there's a mourning about the environment, about our relationship to nature, or even to urban space, because I would consider urban spaces to be nature, which is very controversial for landscape architects. But I consider it a new form of nature. And I also believe that there is no wild nature left untouched by humans. So everything is nature, but there's nature that's non-functioning and degraded, and there's nature that's doing okay. There's definitely a moral about that in the work.
And beyond that environmental mourning, what do you want people to actually feel when they're standing in front of your work?
Maybe a visual place to feel respite from anxiety, or to feel not alone. I wouldn't say I'm a particularly lonely person, but creating paintings is a way to make something that's going through the same thing as me, experiencing the same thing as me. In that way it makes me less lonely, someone else is also feeling in the exact same way. And I become less lonely because other people get to see it too and maybe connect with it. So it's bridging a connection between people and an experience, or between people and each other. And I want people to have access to my work, I think access is really important for visual art right now.
You used the word access. What does that mean to you, in practice?
Access in two ways. The first is physical: public art, free exhibitions, or even just the ability to get to those exhibitions, having the time and the means to get there. The second is emotional. When I talk to people who don't make art, a lot of them say that when they look at something, they don't know how they're supposed to interpret it. And I think it takes a while to figure out that there's no way you're supposed to do it. The way you feel about a painting is the way you feel. You have just as much of a right to interpret or build a relationship with an artwork as anybody else.
And how do you try to create that opening in the work itself?
Through humor, actually. I didn't always know my work was funny, sometimes I wasn't trying to be funny, but people would laugh and say "this is so funny." And I realized it's a really good thing, because humor is such an easy way to make people feel comfortable with a work. If they can laugh at it, they can feel comfortable interpreting it, being in its presence.
We have reached the end of our conversation so I want to focus on one last question: if someone one day saw all of your work together, beyond any single piece, what's the one thing you'd hope they finally understand, not about painting, but about the world, or about how to live inside it?
I don't know if I want to tell them how to live in the world, but I would hope that they feel joy and maybe a sense of connection with the pieces. I would hope that they find them memorable to look at, in one way or another. And I would hope that whatever situation my works are in, all together in a room, it would be a really fun time, that people would have fun and connect with each other at the same time.