Yapci Ramos
Red-Hot, 2018

Menstruation, experienced by roughly half of the world’s population, remains for many a subject of taboo. Artist Yapci Ramos directly confronts the role of menstruation in her new video installation Red-Hot. Writing in her own menstrual blood, Ramos evokes blood magic and horror while also celebrating her own body and decrying taboos. Influenced by travels in Africa and Cuba, Ramos speaks to the shared experience of women. The 18-channel video work evokes 1970s feminist art in its overt presentation of the female body. Red-Hot is marked by Ramos’s unapologetic and unwavering sexuality.

Red-Hot is comprised of three columns of televisions stacked six high, each running from floor to ceiling inside the gallery. Each screen features a single tight cropping of a bathroom wall. Intermittently the artist’s back is visible within the shot as she writes on the tiled backdrop of the shower. Ramos describes her captured actions as visceral. In the creation of this project she is reconnecting with her body. Red-Hot was not originally intended to be presented as a work of art, but rather was driven by a more primal need. The action of capturing her menstrual blood and writing with it began impulsively, a ritual taken on by Ramos as her thirties came to a close and her forties commenced.

Ramos writes the following words on her bathroom wall like a disjointed poem: GO, NOW, WHY, CALM, STOP, DO, WITH, YES, US, TRUE, PATH, COME, 39, HOME, TIME, BE, YOU. Ramos’s words are presented as declarations in all capital letters. Resolute and self-assured she writes with the full palm of her hand, wiping large letters onto the tiled bathroom wall. These are words of strength and potential—aspirations, demands, and mantras. Her terse text length is dictated by the natural limitations of the organic “paint”. The creation of Red-Hot is driven by fundamental action, with each fixed and continuous shot a month in the making. Subsequently, the project also functions as a calendar marking the passage of time and fertility.

Each repetitive shot is framed to establish that the artist is standing is a shower. The screens form a kaleidoscopic manifestation of the establishing shot from Psycho’s iconic shower scene, pairing Hitchcockian iconography with the language of body horror. Ramos enacts a destruction of her own work, and of the affirmations she so clearly declares on each television screen. After this process of fierce erasure Ramos rewrites new next: WAKE, ARE, OUT, TRUST, NOT, UP, I. In doing so, Ramos addresses the issue of agency. She is the one with the power to create and subsequently destroy her creation as she chooses.

Red-Hot as a title brings focused attention to commodification of women’s bodies—perhaps no more perfectly illustrated than by the aforementioned packaged and presented “red hot” Anna Nicole Smith. In Red-Hot, Ramos negotiates her position in society. For over two years, every month, Ramos took on this ritualistic action of creation and destruction. In producing Red-Hot, Ramos places herself front and center in conversations around female empowerment—as a woman, in control of her body, her voice, and her own destiny. Time is up. Ramos demands we read the writing on the wall.

Excerpt from Agency and Action, an essay written by Justine Ludwig.