Brie Ruais

A few things you need to know: each sculpture is her body weight in clay. Though occasionally it has been the combination of hers and a lover’s. As a start, her materials are stacked, often in a pile and then thrust from their center through a series of scripted actions—“shoving,” “scraping,” “twisting,” “scratching”—performed by various limbs or parts—hands, feet, knuckles, knees—leaving the earthy material marked like a bruised body defiantly holding trauma on its surface. The strong yet malleable mass betrays the push and pull of a swift struggle; the material captures her nail scratches and prints like evidence, stilling time: “I am shaping it, as much as it is shaping me.” It, she, they are pliable, compliant and resisting. Earlier in the process, pigment was infused in the clay; as a result, soft, surreal hues emerge from the violence. Next, she layers glaze: sometimes thick like a glossy armor over the vulnerable material, sometimes airbrushed, so that an ethereal, powdery color shades the sharp edges of the sculpture, creating the illusion of depth upon three-dimensionality itself.

A few biographical notes: Brie Ruais lives in Brooklyn but was born in Orange County, and this return to California is manifestly a homecoming, though she will not have you read it as such. If you ask her, she might admit belonging to the state’s natural parks, to the large expanses of land, piles of sand and deep crevices but not to the tarred freeways, strip malls and chain restaurants that line them. The psychic fault line between the monumentality of nature and the demoralizingly ill-considered urban sprawl is a rift inherent to most of this state’s native children who’ve elected to live far away; they hold in their genes the trauma of place whose inception imparts a great willingness to take something that is not ours, to leave things (and people) behind, as well as a conveniently short memory for both. The range of the American landscape is a reference for Ruais. She is drawn to Nature’s self-sufficiency and scale, its materials and palette. In each piece, like a sandcastle, she mirrors the macro in her micro—her lived experience—measuring her own height, weight, and volume in relationship to her context.

Excerpt from the press release by Lauren Mackler

Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California) received her BFA from New York University, and her MFA from Columbia University in 2011. Her work has been exhibited at institutions including the Katzen Center at American University, Washington, DC; Arsenal, Montreal; Museum of Fine Arts Boston; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include Cooper Cole, Toronto; Nicole Klagsbrun, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY; Mesler/Feuer, NY; Lefebrve & Fils, Paris. Group exhibitions include Maccarone, Sperone Westwater and Rachel Uffner in NY; Marc Selwyn Fine Arts in Los Angeles, September gallery in Hudson, NY, Romer Young Gallery, San Francisco, and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels among others. Ruais is the recipient of the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program, the Dieu Donne Fellowship, Montello Foundation Residency, Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship, The Shandaken Project Residency among others. Her work is featured in Vitamin C: New Perspectives in Contemporary Art, Clay and Ceramics, by Phaidon (Fall 2017). Ruais currently lives and works in Brooklyn, USA.