Brie Ruais’s medium is her own—it’s herself and it’s the earth, the soil, the sand, the sea, the sky, the atmosphere, and the wind. And it’s motion, hers and nature’s. Ultimately, it’s like energy and emotion rendered solid.
Ruais knows how to manipulate the elements of nature and how to engage and communicate to and with them. And she is driven by rituals, unique to her. They appear to us as both connected and fragmented, pierced and penetrating.
This show, titled Bone Dice, possesses an enigmatic beauty conveyed by electrifying colors and a rhythmic sense of motion. These allude to growth, to pulsations in the landscape, and to gestures of the wind, all of which are at play in Ruais’s performances, writings, and most of all, in her ceramic pieces, such as Traveling with the Wind, East, 130lbs (2024) and Traveling with the Wind, West, 130lbs (2024).
Ruais is based in New Mexico where she moved from New York a couple of years ago to learn, she says, “how to harvest and process wild clay, and to examine the relationship between people and clay, between people and the land.” Adding to this connection is her 130-pound body stretching and twirling to the substance and pulse of the elements. We see this in a video installation in which Ruais digs into the ocean, her almost nude body pushing sand through the waves until natural, unguided elements create sculpted form, and the presence of her dark shadow in the water appears like a mythological floating sculpture in the distance.
Laying claim to her own territory and path in nature, Ruais measures the cycles of life and death, day and night, the four seasons, as well as certainty and chance. She acknowledges the inspiration of Joan Jonas’s film Wind (1968), with its poetic allusions to the shape of time; and of Bruce Nauman’s poetry of motion in his videos with what she calls his “instructional voice,” and his relentless pacing back and forth in space; and Sarah Sze’s frenzied sculpted odes to fragmentation. We can detect strength and fragility in stunning sweeping photographs of Ruais in which her wind-swept garments mirror her sculptural versions of torn, flying fabric holding forth against the fierce Southwestern wind.
The ten sculptures on exhibit, all glazed stoneware and all 2024, reveal a new intensity in the artist’s work, even a touch of violence, with the remnants of the slashings of a knife in works such as Sharpening the Edge of a Knife on Visibility (Swapped Pieces of Her 130lbs) in which she has cut through the clay marking a division between the dark and light sections of the moon’s phases. In the sculpture Petaling Inward, Piercing Outward, 130 lbs, there is a pinkness at the center, suggesting birth and growth as curled petals reach around like the legs of sea creatures, and in Petaling Inward, Opening Outward, 130lbs, darkness prevails in a tightly composed mandala-type composition, evoking a mournful evocation of mortality. Darkest of all is her Sharpening the Edge of a Knife on Visibility (Swapped Pieces of Her 130lbs Crescent Moon), in which a rim of light appears on one edge of the sphere, eerily eclipsed by darkness. Ruais constructs from the center of her circular sculptures, emerging from the void and rendering herself a master collaborator.
As she projects her strength and determination, she shows her energy as a producer who seemingly requires Sisyphean muscle to manipulate her materials. But her work also expresses an underlying vulnerability and tenderness in her eagerness to collaborate with the creative world at large—with, for example, her generation of poets, such as her late friend Louise Glück, after whose poem Bone Dice the show is inspired.
As in the works of sculptor Lee Bontecou, we are sucked into fathomless holes, but in Ruias’s case, they can be rough-edged and confounding. Through repetition and deviation revealing not only her practice but also her often fragile psyche, she admits us into her mind and matter as participants, enmeshing us in the circularity of her rendering and exposing the physical crafting and architecture of ritual.
