Gabriela Ruiz & Emmett Palaima
Visual Arts Residency

As a collaborative duo, Gabriela Ruiz and Emmett Palaima create multisensory work where technology, memory, and fantasy intersect. Ruiz explores surveillance capitalism and mass consumerism across sculpture, performance, digital media, painting, and installation. Her works manifest inner psychological experience through synthetic materials, saturated color, and psychedelic visual distortions. Palaima creates work with electronics and esoteric processes of sound creation. He is conceptually rooted in the idea that technology and magic are one and the same, and that electricity is a manifestation of elemental forces underlying physical reality. His instruments explore sound as a physical process and embody the sculptural beauty of sound-creation systems. Together, the duo build charged spaces that explore the tensions between desire, control, mysticism, and contemporary digital life.