past
Gay Ribisi started her career as a conceptual artist in the early 70’s and developed through non-functional ceramics, painting, video art, into fine art photography. Having received her masters degree in fine arts from UC Berkeley, Gay began showing her work in galleries and has been in numerous group shows in the bay area and Southern California, including the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Worth Ryder Art Gallery and the Everett Gee Jackson gallery. At the start of her art career, Gay revived a dated technique in ceramics, which gained recognition in an art show held in conjunction with the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. With over 10,000 entries from all over the world, Gay won a bronze medal for her submission. Gay’s passion for art has continued through the years, touching on different mediums and combining older influences with modern techniques, embracing modern technology and the digital movement. The course of her career includes the production of two feature films and a documentary about homeless artists living on the streets of LA. It was in her period of painting portraits, that she questioned the medium’s representation of her subjects and become more interested in the story telling aspect of her art. She found and befriended various homeless artists and musicians and created video portrayals of their lives.

wet
Concurrently, Gay broadened her studies in photography and made the switch to still pictures as her main form of artistic expression. She experimented by encasing her photographic prints in resin blocks and discovered that the subject looked as though they were under water. This gave birth to the idea of shooting people in real life situations, using weights and waterproofing props, under water in a swimming pool… negating the background using black tarp, creating the illusion of weightlessness. Observing hair, clothes and jewelry, moving in a way that defies gravity, along with countless hours of retouching and painting in photoshop. Gay had before her a completed series called “wet”. The exhibition was held at Gallery Saint Germain in West Hollywood, summer of 2005. The collection consists of typical scenes like a woman vacuuming, or a girl watering her plant, to a series of girl fights, etc. a surreal imitation of life emerges from the images, in which the viewer wonders how it is all happening. “Wendy”, the artist’s personal favorite, was the first image of the series that gave the graceful sense of floating in space. “Head above water” was photographed later on commission and was selected to exhibit along with 26 other artists in Soho, at the Westwood gallery in New York City, for art on human rights.

recent work
Currently, Gay has two bodies of work in progress. One series touches on the vulnerability of children and magnifying that experience with vast, deserted landscapes.

“to me children are so innocent...and so fearless and curious yet so vulnerable... That vulnerability could be just for the moment...but it could also be for a lifetime. Our kids grow up to a world that we have made for them... wars, famine, greed, deceit, etc. and there they are so willing and eager to do their part to survive...but we have paved a messy road for them. I feel the same about old people. They are so vulnerable...just like our children...only they have been through the trials and tribulations of life...and it shows in their faces, their eyes, and their body language...they are not so curious anymore.” – Gay Ribisi   

Two out of three images submitted, received honorable mentions in the fall of 2006 “Women In Photography” International competition. Gay’s second body of work in progress, is a series of digital flipbooks, Comprised from thousands of still images that are set to music and put on DVD for viewing. Having documented two video shoots for the Beck album “The Information” and a recent short film and road trip with actor/artist Jason Lee, Gay discovered a fast-paced form of story telling, capturing the essence and spirit of the talent and collaboration involved in the making of both projects, while creating an art piece in itself. Gay currently resides in Los Angeles.