Rue Vashakidze: Held

Rue Vashakidze (born in Tbilisi, Georgia; currently based in the Pacific Northwest) is a mixed media artist whose work explores queerness, pleasure, and embodiment. As a gender nonconforming queer immigrant, Rue creates work navigating the ideas of displacement and belonging, weaving together memory, dream states, and lived experience. Their practice is rooted in personal narrative and the pursuit of softness- a mosaic shaped by longing, resilience, and the ongoing exploration of body as home. Through texture, color, and symbolic language, Rue examines what it means to inhabit a body that resists containment, and to claim joy as both a birthright and a radical act.