Altars, altars everywhere.
A small table outside a shopfront in Taiwan, set each morning with a bowl of fruit, a glass of tea, and burning incense. Altarini hiding down a narrow street in Naples, dripping with votives, photographs and the comforting glow of an LED candle. These are not grand gestures. They are daily ones.
Very Hungry Gods grows from years of sustained attention to devotional life in ordinary places, spanning two residencies in Taiwan, a visit to my grandmother's hometown in southern Italy, and a practice grounded in the belief that the most significant work happens not in the studio but in the street, the kitchen, the sacred spaces and unremarkable corners.
These works are made from what arrives rather than what is sought. Materials come through chance, generosity, and the slow trust that builds when you stay somewhere just long enough. Each object carries the memory of how it came, who gave it, where it was found, and what was said. Those stories feed the work as it grows, and by the time it is finished it has become something else entirely.
In Taiwan, I found a culture of devotion so woven into daily life as to be almost unremarkable. Temple altars overflow with vivid constellations of fruit, packaged foods, flowers, and lights, contemporary materials absorbed into ancient ritual without a second thought. Hello Kitty sits beside a centuries-old sacred figure with complete sincerity. A Roomba noisily cleans the floor, filling the spaces between the sounds of chanting. Tradition does not resist; it absorbs.
In Naples I found it again, dressed differently. The altarini that appear in walls and corners throughout the city carry the same logic: sacred and everyday collapsed into one another, devotion expressed through whatever materials are at hand. Symbolism and iconography. Photographs of the departed. A Madonna surrounded by plastic roses. Diego Maradona rendered with the same care as any saint.
The works move between video, digital collage, and sculpture, built through studio experimentation where organic and synthetic materials interact in ways that cannot be fully controlled. Chance and material behaviour shape the outcome as much as intention. The same visual language extends throughout, fruit, ornament, devotional imagery worked into every surface, the domestic and the sacred refusing to stay separate.
This exhibition does not collapse devotional cultures into one another or argue that they are the same. It is more interested in the moments where they recognise each other across distance, the flicker of something older and more persistent than any single tradition. The apple and the lotus. The fake flower and the real one. The light left burning for another realm.
The gods are hungry. Let your cup runneth over.
- Ariel Ruby
