New York artist Aïda Ruilova creates short format videos inspired by the collage aesthetic of avant-garde cinema and the tensions that horror films elicit. Maximizing the power of both sound and image, Ruilova's meticulously edited works compress cinema's narrative conventions to highlight physical and psychic conflicts. Her subjects, often filmed in extreme close-up, seem unable to control their own bodies; some appear to be under attack by the camera while others try to suppress some force yearning to escape from within.

Hey (1999), once appropriately exhibited in a decrepit stairwell of the P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, features a middle-aged woman dangling between a staircase and a floor. The camera views her from behind and, as she looks over her shoulder, her cries—seemingly for help—are interspersed with the amplified scrapes of her fingernails across the banister. You're Pretty (1999) features a long-haired shirtless man who alternately caresses a guitar amplifier while crooning “you're pretty” and pushes a vinyl record along the cement floor and rough walls of a dank basement. His aloneness pushes the unreality inward, evoking an amplified space of private psychosis.

Tuning (2002) and two untitled works (2002-2003) can be seen as bookends to Ruilova's output thus far. Both allow the viewer a peek at the sources of and resources needed for her art by slowing down the rapid-fire pace. The first, a forty-second homage, features static shots of the artist and renowned French horror film director Jean Rollin sitting hand-in-hand in an ornate drawing room. Over repetitive guitar chords, the frame slowly and repeatedly comes into focus, cutting out at the very moment their unsmiling faces are recognizable. The two Untitled works feature a recording session that has been re-animated to create a forced landscape. The first untitled video features a woman draped across the boom arm of a crane supporting a camera. The arm descends into the frame from the right, then rises and falls in concert with a soundtrack composed of strained breathing. The second is set on a rocky cliff of Big Sur; again a woman is seen laying on her side, this time with her back to the camera and reel-to-reel recording device slung over her shoulder. In each, the viewer cannot tell if the inert woman is alive; Ruilova's signature sense of unease creeps into the frame despite the unthreatening setting.

Ruilova's works subvert both horror movie and music video clichés, pitting the overplayed drama of one against the rapid-fire editing of the other. The result is a staccato take on the grotesque that simultaneously reveals the anxieties of human nature and the optimism of pure beauty.