Amy Ruhl, Between Tin Men
September 10 – November 5, 2023
on participantafterdark.art

PARTICIPANT INC is pleased to present the launch of Amy Ruhl, Between Tin Men, an interactive multi-media web-based project on PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK.

Occupying L. Frank Baum's world of Oz, Amy Ruhl's Between Tin Men reanimates the great American fairy tales with narratives of revolutionary feminism, Marxism, and modern love. Manifesting variously as live performance, installation, video, and website-as-performance, Between Tin Men follows the ongoing story of Nimmie Amee – a minor (Munchkin) character in Baum's universe – and her infatuation with a Tin Man who has already lost his heart to another metal lover. Through its multiple manifestations, the project performs the cinematic and literary mass media franchise, while underscoring the radical possibilities of fan labor, gift economies, and the communities forged through common obsession with fictional worlds.

Between Tin Men on PARTICIPANT AFTER DARK gathers the various incarnations of the 8-year project into a living archive on the occasion of the work’s physical culmination at KCAI Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice. A continuation of the interactive mode that began with betweentinmen.com, the archive also traces the project’s evolution into the new performance collective, Flowers in the Basement (with Kite, Mel Elberg, Tsedaye Makonnen, and Alisha Wormsley), coming to Participant IRL in January 2024.

Site Design, Video,and Performance: Amy Ruhl
3D and Interaction Designer on the Gift Shop, Yuri Fukuda
After Dark Director, Itziar Barrio
After Dark Technical Associate, Caroline Mills

Amy Ruhl is an interdisciplinary artist working across fields of performance, new media, video, installation, and experimental theater. Her practice spawns long-term projects that flesh out conceptual worlds, create embodied fictions, and continually branch off into correlative work and collaborations. Ruhl has performed at NYU Skirball Center, Roulette Intermedium and Irondale Theater (Brooklyn, NY), The Broad Museum and REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) and the Live Arts Biennial at Bard Fisher Center (Red Hook, NY). She has exhibited her visual art and films at galleries and venues such as Lubov, Essex Flowers, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Anthology Film Archives (New York), KCAI Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice (Kansas City, MO) Vitrine Gallery (London), Public Fiction (Los Angeles), and Pleasure Dome (Toronto, Ontario). 

Between Tin Men is best accessed on a computer screen.