Local Language is pleased to present our first exhibition of 2021 – A Mountain of Hills by Artist in Residence Ruth Le Roux.

A mountain (a collective noun for hills) is a place to escape for adventure, but also a place where one can find solace. Similarly, Le Roux views her artistic journey as beginning with expressive, bold painting and ending with meditative mark-making. The second aspect of her process could not take place without the first, and that tension transforms the first painting into something layered and altogether new.

The white hash marks of the printed acrylic overlays produced during her Local Language residency are a callback to the start of her artistic path, when she studied woodcuts and linocut printmaking. “I don’t have the patience now to dive into that process of drawing, cutting, printing, then cutting again, so I was really excited when I discovered that drawing white lines and marks over an otherwise chaotic painting was the best of both worlds.” The resulting artworks are colorful and layered, physical in their dimensionality and graphic in their window-like viewpoints, harkening to worlds both real and mythical.

The exhibition will be on view Saturdays, from 1-5pm.