The camera is a liberatory device for Louise Fago-Ruskin.  In her mid-thirties, she turned to it in order to document and analyze her life in a moment of profound rupture as she left an evangelical fundamentalist church movement, where she had been a dedicated member for over two decades.  Through the camera lens, Fago-Ruskin began to summon dark, shrouded images laced with ambiguity and unease.  On the one hand, these photographs possessed a hermetic quality, echoing the closed religious world that she had recently left behind.  On the other hand, the dark, almost velvety spaces she depicted also became generative places, in which she could develop a new sense of self.

Over the years, as the artist probed this darkness intuitively, she found within it a potent symbolic lexicon, unscripted by the religious dogma of the high control community she had left behind and connected instead to her family’s Eastern European Jewish roots.  In this world, the material trappings of traditional Jewish trades predominate, from cobblers’ shoe molds to embroidery scissors and bolts of fabric.  These objects speak to a life of quiet rituals and humble creativity that the artist carefully braided into her own renascent sense of identity.

And yet, in the aftermath of the Shoah, these objects also stand as markers of a lost world, suspended in a sort of limbo between memory and imagination.  Fago-Ruskin is haunted, above all, she notes, by stories of her Great Uncle Moszek, who lost his life in the Warsaw Ghetto after miraculously cheating assassination.  In this body of work, Fago-Ruskin enacts an impossible journey, seeking personal renewal in family history, only to find that the past cannot offer—and indeed never did—any refuge. 

 From this personal vantage point, the artist seeks to create work that speaks to the experiences of other communities caught up in “the anguish of exile, displacement and exclusion,” as she puts it.  “We are in the midst of global conflict, migration and displacement on a monumental scale,” she writes.  In the face of such rupture, we must strive towards restoration—Til All is Correct, in the artist’s words—while knowing the scales may never be balanced.