her interest in primatology with an artist residency observing bonobos at the Wild Animal Park in San Diego (2005). In 2006, she returned to SAIC, where she teaches in the Contemporary Practices department. In recent years, Ruttan has exhibited in numerous universities and arts institutions, including the Chicago Cultural Center, Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art, and Elmhurst Museum. Work and reception Unlike most artists, Ruttan's work is unified by its topical focus on understanding human behavior rather than by medium or style. Her inquiries lead her to diverse disciplines (primatology, evolutionary biology, feminism, political science, history) and often-new media that she chooses to best physically manifest the narrative she is structuring. Ruttan describes her process as research-based, immersive and non-hierarchical; her intent is to evoke a viewer's own relationship to a subject rather than elicit a specific response. Her practice can be divided into two thematic categories involving human drives, each with distinct bodies of work: 1) Inquiries into food and sex; and 2) Inquiries into aggression and war. Inquiries into sex and appetite Ruttan's early work explored appetite and desire and their relationship to social norms and excess, employing various media. Critic Susan Snodgrass wrote that her "diverse oeuvre" playfully questioned "the entangled relationship of sexuality, consumption, censorship and taboo." Alan Artner, however, encountered "a plethora of good ideas" whose connection he found elusive. Ruttan first gained widespread attention for her "Dough Girls" (1994–5): bread dough sculptures cast from a mold of a women's bottom and baked in pairs of women's underwear; critics noted in them an amusing, uneasy mingling of "wholesome and abject" associations. In works from her "Food" series (1996–98), such as Sweet Potatoe Pie, Ruttan appropriated pornographic images and then strategically obscured them with circular "cut-outs" of gourmet food magazines, creating tantalizing compositions that denied easy comprehension and satisfaction of either drive. Her "Colors" series (1997) employed a similar approach using candy colored, Hans Arp-like silhouettes that created a disorienting, high/low collision of cartoon, abstract art and porn aesthetics. Ruttan extended this work with the droll looped animations bippity Bop and bob bob (2000), which were partly inspired by biological research positing gender-defined, "hardwired" human responses. She stripped pornographic videos down to flat, pulsating, non-explicit biomorphic shapes, then carefully tracked their movement to retain the rhythms and shapes of sex in order to trigger dawning recognition in viewers. The double projection Chromophilia (2001) likewise featured bright,