Ruth Hayes
https://sites.evergreen.edu/ruthhayes/
Ruth produces experimental works in film, video and digital media as well as pre-cinema formats. Over the course of a decade, she published nineteen flipbook titles that have been widely exhibited, including in “Daumenkino: The Flipbook Show” at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf, Germany (2005). Many of these are available for sale on her Etsy site (search “Ruth Hayes Flipbooks”) and her Random Motion website. Ruth’s filmic works explore diverse topics in essayistic form. “Reign of the Dog: A Re-Visionist History” deconstructed the history of the conquest of the Americas and “Wanda” contrasted feline and feminine desire. “On Our Way” responds to changes in the landscapes of Western Washington State, in contrast to reflections on American landscapes by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In her current work, Ruth has returned to analog explorations of pattern, looping, photograms, cyanotypes, phytography, and hand-processing 16mm film. “Perilous Experiment” and “Copper Perforation Loop Triptych” both play with materiality and chance occurrences in crafting and projection.
Ruth earned her MFA in Experimental Animation at California Institute of the Arts, and is faculty emerita at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, where she has taught in broadly interdisciplinary courses that explore animation in the contexts of media studies, art, history, literature, social studies, physics and math.