Verónica Ruth Frías

Verónica Ruth Frías - Armed to the teeth

Technique: Casting

Artist Biography: Verónica Ruth Frías (Spain, 1978) is a contemporary Spanish feminist artist based in Málaga, who forms her works through performances in which the body is subject to the work. She graduated in Fine Arts from the Faculty of Santa Isabel de Hungría in Seville. Appropriation, costumes and tattoos are some of her tools with which she places her body at the service of art and transforms the personal into artistic practices. Sarcasm, irony and humour are fundamental for the artist, although she deals with very serious subjects such as the construction of the feminine, motherhood, violence against women or discrimination against women in the history of art. Her work has been shown in numerous exhibitions including Super M at the ECCO in Cádiz, Narraciones Extra(ordinarías) at the ABA Art Gallery in Palma de Mallorca and Yo quiero mucho a mi mamá at the Tula Prins Gallery in Córdoba, He has also received grants and awards such as the INICIARTE Production Grant from the Andalusian Regional Government, the Rafael Botí Grant from the Rafael Botí Provincial Foundation of Plastic Arts in Cordoba, the prize in the DESENCAJA Plastic Arts Competition in Malaga and the prize in the 10th Pepe Espaliú Plastic Arts Competition, also in Cordoba.

 

Armed to the teeth Verónica Ruth Frías in collaboration with Guillermo Sáenz Armed to the teeth (contemporary jewelry) is a piece conceived as portable art and is born directly from the work of Verónica Ruth Frías of the same title and in which she showed a reflection on the fear that many women feel; fear of walking alone, fear of being assaulted or fear of being attacked in the middle of the night for the mere fact of being women and unaccompanied. The work was formalized as a video installation, in which the central piece is a video of a disturbing Veronica with a fixed and impassive gaze, pointing directly at us with the barrel of a hunting shotgun. This powerful image is accompanied by a photograph of the shotgun as an archive and a series of "personal" defense objects. The objects referred to - real objects from real women - are everyday objects that can be carried in a purse or pocket, but which at a specific moment can be used to defend oneself. Women all over the world feel that instinctive fear that constantly hovers over them, that heavy shadow of sexual aggression, and they often rely on some object that magically becomes a defensive weapon: a stone in their pocket, a pencil or a pair of keys wielded as a bladed weapon. These objects function as an archeological vestige of the immediate present of women who, day after day, walk through the world unsure of themselves. From these objects arises the collaborative project between the artist Verónica Ruth Frías and the jeweler Guillermo Sáenz, with the intention of decontextualizing the objects of the installation in a series of rings conceived as a piece of art. Five rings in which we can see the pencil, a stone, the front of a key, a thorn and a gun -as a visual metaphor of the video-. Armed to the teeth (contemporary jewelry) is a set of rings made of sterling silver with a shiny silver finish, oxidized silver patina and 24 Kt gold plating. This set aims to take the artwork to that other place of exhibition, the body itself, which serves as a canvas, as a positioning and as a way to make visible a real problem that affects us as women.