The Best Part of Believe is the Lie, 2026, acrylic, wool, cotton, nylon and wool yarn and monkscloth, 150 x 150 cm.

Rutledge’s interdisciplinary practice explores queerness, community, trauma, intimacy, and spectacle through performance, video, sculpture, textiles, and painting. Drawing on personal experience, pop music, and the symbolic language of femininity — high heels, ruffles, lace, and bows — the work examines how identity, desire, grief, and vulnerability are expressed and performed.

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Recent work focuses on Berlin’s queer BDSM community, exploring how intimacy, ritual, pain, and pleasure can create spaces for care, connection, and agency. Through listening, exchange, testimony, and communal experience, these encounters are translated into performance, video, and sculpture.

During the residency, Rutledge continues to explore how trauma is embodied and how vulnerability can become a means of connection and collective experience.

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MY SPACE 

SOLO EXHIBITION BY CATIE RUTLEDGE

October 30 – November 20, 2026

Opening: Friday, October 30 at 06:00 PM

Catie Rutledge’s solo presentation at Scope BLN extends the persistent mechanisms of her practice—an emotional mining of Millennial American teen angst and isolation. Cribbing song titles and lyrics from early 2000s “emo” bands, Rutledge’s materially rich practice returns persistently, to music that defined itself as a countercultural, and yet mainstream output (if you were emo in high school you never actually admitted to liking My Chemical Romance or Fall Out Boy) as system by which a generation identified itself in opposition, and allegiance to. Twenty years later, and still shouted from memory in karaoke rooms across the world, these anthems resound, now contextualized as music that reflects/ed the fucked up state of the world in a cyclical, repeating anthem of self loathing and righteousness.

My Space centers “Away Message,” Rutledge’s expansive wall textile, or “rug” constructed of tufted wool and synthetic yarn. The work unfolds spatially, constructing the title of a 2006 track by Seattle’s The Blood Brothers, “Love Rhymes with Hideous Car Wreck,” which traces the lost romance of the protagonist prior to his nearly fatal motorist accident. Tender, yet awkwardly confrontational, Rutledge’s tapestries collapse the historical heraldry of parade and protest signage with the comfort and Walmart craft kit aesthetic of a pre-teen’s bedroom. Reminding us of what is now a near cloying, naivete of choosing AIM and MTV to social experiences, acknowledge the darker realization, pre-social media, of bedroom-as-safe-space, a place and system for processing personal and collective trauma through the emotional release of voguing, hairbrush diva, in throes of anger, longing, embarrassment, desire, pain, and defiance. Here installed spatially within the gallery, Rutledge’s work becomes an environment, citations constructed in space, cribbed from the artist’s mind map, arrayed on an adjacent wall. Directly opposite sits a video work in which the artist performs as her 12-year-old and 33-year-old selves simultaneously, making public performance out of what was previously reserved for the mirror in her bedroom, under cover of nightfall.

Cultural nostalgia is a cyclical phenomenon, an anticipatory spectral expectation of our future. Yet, as with the onset of Millennial aging experienced alongside prophesied effects of global warming and societal collapse, it’s arrived too soon, catching us unawares, checking our wristwatch cum iphone. Rutledge’s unapologetic reminder of adolescent angst that still feels more apropos than distant, activates the sentiments of youth, or lost innocence, of the emo phase itself. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Text by: Mary Coyne

Friday, October 30 at 06:00 PM

Scope BLN, Lübecker Str. 43 10559 Berlin

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