Weeds is a 24 page hand sewn artist book by Ricardo Vicente Jose Ruiz.

“ I love weeds - Ricardo”

Ricardo Vicente Jose Ruiz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice synthesizes Indigenous oral traditions and ethnographic botanical histories as a foundation to discuss sociopolitical infrastructure in the Americas. Ricardo blends folklore and ethnobotany as a means to discuss the difficult histories navigated via marginalized groups affected by colonialism. Their intention is to disseminate an intersectional dialogue that accesses past, present, and future timelines to locate modes for metaphysical reconciliation. Ricardo’s work reflects on the issues of the everyday and is meant to represent a fluid curricula that encourages community building and reengagement with the natural world.

Grounded in research, prose, personal memoir, and the philosophical teachings of curanderismo (Mexican faith healing) Ricardo initiates a conversation as to how does healing manifest in the 21th century. With a studio practice rooted in drawing works manifest in a variety of media such as images, texts, physical gestures initiated via the artist’s body, archived documentation, charms, garments, and ritual objects.

Ricardo is focused on the development of a contemporary mythos and symbology that dissolves post - colonial European constructs that perpetuate invisible barriers built through a history of discrimination and subversive socio-political tactics. The participants in the narrative are the materialized consciousness of fauna and flora as they motion through latent instinct to act as caretakers for perpetually occurring physical and psychic systems. Due to the genetic abilities of fauna and flora to adapt, heal, mutate, and populate it extends their durability and roles in engaging disruptions within multiple dimensions and periods of time. The disruptions occur as psychic cages, hauntings, climate change phenomena, and radical impulses of other organisms motivated to pollute. The characters actions occur alongside fluid personal impetus to engage in nuanced gestures such affection, leisure, and mischief. Their day to day is meant to preserve and illustrate the history of indigenous communities whose routine emphasized biodiversity and relationship with their surrounding ecology. - Clown Kisses Press