RUBY Projects presents Hit Back, a group exhibition examining the shifting terrain of language in contemporary American life — where words are no longer passive tools of communication, but active sites of power.

Originally conceived through neon and glass — materials historically associated with visibility, signage, and public speech — the exhibition expands into a broader inquiry: what happens when language itself becomes unstable? When certain terms are alternately institutionalized, weaponized, or removed from circulation altogether?

Across painting, sculpture, installation, and text-based works, the artists in Hit Back approach language not simply as content, but as material — shaped by policy, culture, and perception. Words such as health, identity, history, sex, and diversity have become newly charged, shifting between neutrality and threat depending on context.

Rather than offering a singular political position, Hit Back traces how meaning fractures under pressure. Some works foreground rupture and distortion; others lean into seduction, humor, or restraint. In each case, language appears less as a stable system than as a field of negotiation between individual agency and institutional control.

The exhibition asks not what words mean, but who determines their legitimacy — and how those determinations shape what can be imagined, spoken, or made visible.

Hit Back brings together artists whose practices navigate these tensions through form, image, and space. What emerges is not a unified stance, but a shared recognition: language today operates as architecture, quietly structuring the limits of discourse.

Opening Reception

February 27 | Evening

Exhibition on view through April 18

Week before and after reserved for install and deinstall

Artists

Jeremy Bert
Jen Elek
Minhi England
Kelsey Fernkopf
Steve Gilbert
Tommy Gregory
Juan de Dios Mora
Justin Parr
Robert Pruitt
Laura Stevenson
Vincent Valdez
Ed Wilson
Yale Wolf