Joey Fauerso:
Bedroom Paintings
6.07.25—5.10.26
Ruby City is proud to present Bedroom Paintings, a new multimedia installation by San Antonio–based artist Joey Fauerso. Known for her deeply personal and politically engaged practice, Fauerso explores the intersection of domestic life and artistic expression through video, painting, printmaking, and artist-designed furniture.
At the heart of the exhibition is a four-channel video, Bedroom Paintings (2024), in which 18 of the artist’s friends and family members perform nightly rituals of sleep, restlessness, and insomnia. Set entirely in and around beds made with Fauerso’s black-and-white painted canvases, the video transforms acts of tossing, turning, and dreaming into a dynamic, painterly experience. As the linens fold and shift with each movement, the paintings take on new, abstract forms. Organized around three themes—Sleeping, Thrashing, and Dreaming—the piece invites viewers into an intimate, layered narrative shaped by collaboration, family, and memory.
Joey Fauerso; Bedroom Paintings; 2024; (film still) 4-Channel video; 23:44; Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City; San Antonio, Texas; © Joey Fauerso
The soundtrack is equally rich: the opening lullaby features music by the artist’s father, lyrics by her brother, and text from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack-Up. Fauerso composed and recorded the remainder of the video’s sound, creating a textured audio landscape that underscores the emotional depth of the work.
Complementing the video are additional pieces that extend its themes. A series of six prints, Bedroom Paintings (every pillow and blanket)(2024), created in collaboration with Hare & Hound Press, offers a catalog of the imagery and references embedded in the video—from historical artworks to personal portraits. Also included is a bench designed by Fauerso to resemble the beds featured onscreen, inviting visitors to sit, reflect, and immerse themselves in the installation.
Fauerso’s subtractive painting technique—where paint is applied and then scraped away using everyday tools—gives her surfaces a carved, tactile quality. This approach blurs the lines between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration, echoing her broader interest in collapsing traditional artistic boundaries.
Shaped by her early experiences in an experimental utopian community in Iowa, Fauerso’s work is grounded in performance, collaboration, and community. With Bedroom Paintings, she turns the private space of the bedroom into a site of creative transformation—where vulnerability, restlessness, and memory are given visual form.
Join us on Saturday, August 23, 2025, for a special walkthrough and conversation with Joey Fauerso and Ruby City Director Elyse Gonzales. This event is free and open to the public.
Joey Fauerso; Bedroom Paintings; 2024; (film still) 4-Channel video; 23:44; Linda Pace Foundation Collection, Ruby City; San Antonio, Texas; © Joey Fauerso
About the Artist
Joey Fauerso, a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, is a San Antonio–based artist and professor at Texas State University whose work spans painting, video, installation, and performance, exploring themes of gender, humor, and family. Her work has been shown at venues including MASS MoCA, Crystal Bridges, and The Drawing Center. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including grants from the Joan Mitchell and Sustainable Arts Foundations, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Kunstlerhaus Bethanien. Her artist books are held in collections at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.