Opal Ecker DeRuvo

Opal Ecker DeRuvo is a nonbinary trans-feminine artist working with the materials and histories of photography, printmaking, and representational drawing and painting. Through devotional acts of image and object making, they question the rigid and violent organizing principles that structure our public and private lives—and hold sacred the complexity of embodiment, intimacy, and identity construction. They have created room-size installations exploring the bathtub as a metaphor for the body; made large-scale kallitypes using the mechanics of light to reveal the fluidity of a figure in space; and combined mechanical drawing, photo processes, and oil painting to capture the delicacy of healing. They view process, materiality, and embodied knowledge as essential research in their studio practice. They are driven by a compulsion to seek out the ghost of the making in all things that are made—and their desire to share the revelations they find in these encounters.