BODY OF WORK TIMELINE

 
Echoes and Afterimages
RUTH TOBIAS

Through imagining what might have been, I hope to bring memory to life; igniting compassion and creating a collective call for social change.


2021 TO PRESENT

Lives Eliminated, Dreams Illuminated
If Wishes Were Horses

Based on historical Holocaust photographs, these paintings imagine the possible hopes, dreams, and untold stories of girls and young women whose lives were brutally cut short; honoring those lives and reminding the world that it must never happen again.


2018 TO 2021

Particulate Dream
66 Motel

This series of paintings explores the underlying fears of our current climate crisis and envisions hope for the next Utopia rising from the remains of devastation.


2018

Lost In America
Holy Cow II

Lost in America is an imaginative-realism view of America’s utopian ideal and of the myth of America as a welcoming melting pot.


2015

Ameritopia
Road Trip

I am exploring female identity within the constructs of idealized mythical America. The backdrop of modernist architecture and idealized femininity baits the question of “What is the American Utopia?”



2012

CalHalla
Isn’t This Your Dream

These paintings probe a loss of cultural optimism and the irresolution of post-feminist issues. They are ironic and playful yet confront conflicting expectations.



2009

Echos of the State of the Union
Come You Masters Of War

Influenced by the 2008 presidential election, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Wall Street meltdown, these paintings depict our complacency juxtaposed with the reality of war.


2008

Everything’s Under Control
Everything’s Under Control

This series courts irony. The inner narratives are playful while confronting the conflicting expectations of contemporary culture and the intricately complex ways in which we form our identities.


2006

American Pastoral
New Freedom

By referencing the mid-20th century—a time period that exists in the cultural subconscious as an almost mythical time of American optimism and prosperity—the immediacy of the issues are removed from our current cultural climate and allow for emotional distance and perspective.


2004

American Dream
I Dreamed I Went Shopping

The romanticized suburban setting is used not as a record of a specific place, but as an iconic backdrop to an exploration of the fears and uncertainties that nip at the edges of the post-feminist landscape.


2002

NeoNostalgia
Three Graces

NeoNostalgia explores a loss of cultural optimism and the ongoing irresolution of such post-feminist issues as sexuality versus intellectualism, and acquiescence versus ambition.


2001