Brie Ruais
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Brie Ruais is an American artist based in Brooklyn, New York,[1] working in large “multi-faceted” ceramic sculptures,[2] performance,[1] photography,[citation needed] video,[3] and site-specific installation.[1]
Ruais’ work is a process-oriented, performative,[4] body-conscious strain of feminist sculpture[5] and addresses themes such as the environment,[1] eco-feminism,[6] feminist theory,[7] and embodiment.[8] Her work falls in the lineage of body-based conceptual artists Janine Antoni,[5] Bruce Nauman, Lynda Benglis, and Eleanor Antin;[9] artists whose work engages with the land such as Michelle Stuart,[4] Ana Mendieta,[4][2] and Richard Long;[4] as well as the gestural athleticism of action painting[9] and Richard Serra’s lead performances.[3] Her work has also been compared to artists whose work is influenced by their natural surroundings like Georgia O'Keeffe and Agnes Martin.[2]
Ruais was born in 1982 in Southern California.[6] She received her BS in Studio Art from New York University Steinhardt School in 2004.[10] She received her MFA from the School of the Arts at Columbia University in 2011, where she studied with Jon Kessler.[10][11]
Work
Ruais’s abstract ceramic sculptures[1] retain both the primordial, earthen origins of clay[12] as well as the physical and psychological imprint of their maker.[8] Working on the floor,[6] Ruais begins her work with a predetermined set of actions[7] and an amount of clay that often equals her own bodyweight.[13] The titles of her work reference the gestures she performs, like “spreading out from center,” “compressing,” “pushing landscape,” and “making space from the inside.”[14] Her process is highly physical and it is performed quickly from beginning to end, utilizing her entire body.[6] She is described as kicking, spreading, scraping, and skimming,[6] cinching, ramming, and shoving the material across the floor or up a wall.[12] The resulting form is then cut into segments, glazed, fired, and hung on the wall.[5] The finished sculpture is embedded with the marks of this process: “whorled and rutted from fingers, elbows and boot treads”.[5] The sculptures are topographical[12] documents of the performance that formed them.[5] Ruais’ work explores both the limits of the body[5] and the material.[15]
Ruais is known for her circular wall works[15] that measure on average 80 inches (2 meters) in diameter.[16] The sculptures are made on the floor and then hung vertically on the wall.[17] They resemble clocks, starbursts,[3] ray-like forms, punctures, and wounds.[8] In Scraped Away from Center, 130lbs (Night) (2018), for example, the pigmented stoneware extends outward from the center, where Ruais knelt to make it, into a circular form with jagged edges.[16]
Books
Exhibitions
- 2024 Brie Ruais: Bone Dice, Albertz Benda, New York, NY[19][20]
- 2024 Brie Ruais: Oneness, Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh, PA[21]
- 2021 Movement on the Edge of the Land, Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX[1][2][22]
- 2021 Taking Space: Contemporary Women Artists and the Politics of Scale, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA[14][23]
- 2021 This is America, Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin, Germany[24][25]
- 2021 This Earth: Notes and Observations From Montello Foundation Artists, The Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, UT[14][26]
- 2020 Formed and Fired: Contemporary American Ceramics, The Anderson Collection, Stanford University, Stanford, CA[14][27]
- 2020 The Body, The Object, The Other, Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA[14][28]
- 2020 Afterimages, Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Québec, Canada[29][30][31]
- 2019 Earth Piece, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY[14][32]
- 2019 America Will Be!: Surveying the Contemporary Landscape, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas[14][33][34]
- 2019 Intimate Immensity, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA[14][35]
- 2019 The Form Will Find its Way: Contemporary Ceramic Sculptural Abstraction, The Katherine E. Nash Gallery at the Regis Center for Art, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN[36]
- 2017 New Ruins, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington DC[37][38]
- 2015 Crafted: Objects in Flux, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA[14][39]
- 2015 The Familiar and the Indefinable in Clay: The Scripps 71st Ceramic Annual, Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Claremont, CA[40]
- 2014 EAF14 Exhibition, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY[41][42]
- 2013 Vessels, The Horticulture Society of New York, New York, NY[43][44]
- 2011 BYTS Bosch Young Talent Show, Stedelijk Museum, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands[45]
