Take a trip with me into Glowball’s world, one where adorable little creatures live joyfully, memes abound, and intimacy is deliciously subverted. As both an artist and curator, Glowball (aka Asia Ruggiero) has a knack for pushing her ideas to create
imaginary universes through her widely popular events in Toronto. She invents something new and captivating every time, bringing together talented creators and building an inclusive environment for all. Meeting over coffee on a rainy afternoon, I
asked Glowball if she considers community building an essential part of her practice, to which she promptly replied, “Yes! Capital Y, yes.” She added that without her support network, she would not be the artist she is today. Connecting with other artists and supporting each other is what enables her to grow.
Glowball’s personal artworks create a world of curiosity and whimsy. Swirling lines fuel the imaginative environments of her illustrations, emphasizing nature's serenity. She tells me that seeing the coloured pencil illustrations by Inuk artist Parr encouraged her to embrace her playfully intuitive style of drawing. Another of her artistic inspirations is Japanese illustrator Aya Takano, who draws in a modern, superflat style and creates enchanting environments with soft colour palettes.
Her last exhibition, ‘Perhaps I Should Keep This to Myself,’
co-created with Toronto artist Kay Rangel, allowed visitors to dive into the artist’s secrets through paintings which feel private and voyeuristic. Tiny lines of text, dispersed across the gallery walls, divulge more raunchy confessions; reading them makes me feel like I’m at a sleepover, only here the writing is literally on the wall. Hanging from the ceiling in the centre of the room is a locket necklace, to which the artists added items as a representation of the group’s care for one another. During a locket-making workshop in the gallery on Valentine’s Day, ‘Perhaps I Should Keep This to Myself’s Curators and Artists’ read from Audre Lorde’s iconic essay ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.’ Lorde’s passage, “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives,” (Lorde, 1978) is a reminder of the strength gained when we are connected with our desire without shame. Glowball tells me later in the rainy-day cafe both reading and writing are essential to her artistic process; she has several notebooks for different concepts and is constantly writing ideas down all day.
An ongoing curatorial project, ‘Please Don’t Make Me Get a Job’, is the
invention of Asia and her creative partner Wolfgang Huska, exploring anything you could envision related to current internet landscapes through artworks that make you feel like you’ve just walked right into your screen. There is an intriguing contradiction between the historic principles of oil paintings and the exhibition’s ridiculous subjects, subverting centuries of rigid Eurocentric values in art. Even the duo’s Instagram page, which posts text memes and photos of minions, is a sharp contrast to a “serious” curator’s approach.
Asia tells me her curatorship practice has now become deeply intertwined with her online identity, to the point where even several of her professors have started to call her Glowball. Artists are all becoming progressively involved in the digital world to share their work, which can help create communities as well as artistic personas. Deliberately unserious, their last exhibition, ‘Pls Pay Me!,’ featured artists whose work draws visual references from anything between Reddit memes and Snapchat stories. This theme is part of an emerging style in art that Glowball feels eager to showcase: the memeification of fine arts into cultural artifacts that are intentionally superficial.
Asia’s upcoming thesis show, ‘Sunlight in a Deep Forest,’ will feature artists whose work explores methods of care, influenced by Filipino culture and her bond with her grandmother. The show will investigate topics related to end-of-life care, moments of gentleness, and emotional connections to traditions and customs, engaging with nature as a place for transformation. She tells me she wishes to tap more into her Filipina heritage and its spirituality and that this show is very personal to her.
Edited by Hanna Villegas