Saddle Muscle

Shane Ruth
Hackensack, New Jersey
October 2007

Regretfully, I will miss the opening tonight of Saddle Muscle at Sunday, a new gallery in the East Village. A very special friend, Shane Ruth, will be showing recent work in sculpture and video, and on a balmy afternoon earlier this fall, I had the privilege of accompanying him on a shoot for this exhibition.

Partly, Shane brought me along on this adventure to an equestrian park in suburban New Jersey to take pictures and turn a video camera on and off, but my real job was to play "girlfriend" in the event we ran into any trouble. As hard as I try, it's not often that I get to be someone's girlfriend, so I jumped at the opportunity. I wore cut-off denim shorts and a soft peach t-shirt, and he even drove me around in his car and bought me cheeseburgers and onion rings and took me to a Vietnamese spa afterwards. Wow. Why can't I find a girlfriend just like that?

Shane has charisma that makes almost everyone swoon, and watching him rock his home-made saddle half-naked out in the woods was a little moment of heaven. And when we were inevitably accosted by a concerned father whose house bordered the train tracks, I was prepared with my best midwestern smile and naivete.

To see more of Shane's cloth cowboy accoutrements, and the final performance on the equestrian field, stop by:

Project Space: Saddle Muscle
Sunday L.E.S.
237 Eldridge
Dec.14 - Jan 6