Rick Araluce: The Final Stop

Oct 20 2017 - Jan 28 2018

Renwick Gallery

Washington, DC

Rick Araluce: The Final Stop transforms a gallery into an abandoned underground subway platform in the artist’s first large-scale installation on the East Coast. Stepping on to the platform, visitors are enveloped in the illusion of an eerie subterranean world where flickering lights and distant rumblings suggest the comings and goings of trains that never arrive.

Araluce is an artist and scenic designer based in Seattle. His immersive, hyper-real environments, in the form of both and room-sized installations and miniature works, reflect his fascination with forgotten and transitional spaces and with what lies hidden there. He incorporates light, sound, and meticulously constructed trompe-l’oeil elements into his installations to create subtle narratives and suggestions of spaces just out of reach, enhancing the feeling that viewers have entered a new, unnerving reality.

Araluce’s interdisciplinary works reflect his intense engagement with materials and process. Nearly all elements of his installations are fabricated by Araluce himself, from handmade pipe fittings to hand-carved furniture to wood painted to exactly resemble concrete cracking with age, all designed to help deepen the illusion of a forgotten reality. One of Araluce’s inspirations is miniaturist and criminologist Frances Glessner Lee, whose works are the subject of the exhibition Murder is Her Hobby: Frances Glessner Lee and The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death in the adjoining galleries.

This site-specific installation was designed by Araluce for the Renwick Gallery as part of the museum’s ongoing exploration of large-scale contemporary works in its historic gallery spaces. Nora Atkinson, the museum’s Lloyd Herman Curator of Craft, organized the installation.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

  • Installation
  • American
  • Contemporary
  • Rick Araluce

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