ONENESS: Brie Ruais is on view at Contemporary Craft, Pittsburgh
February 2 – May 4, 2024
Contemporary Craft is pleased to announce Oneness: Brie Ruais, the first in its new Tomayko Solo Artist Elevation Series. Oneness features work by New Mexico-based artist Brie Ruais. Ruais focuses on ideas around mapping places geographically, psychologically, and experientially. Made from the artist’s body weight in clay, Ruais’ work inherently addresses the experience of embodiment: movement-based artwork that forges an intimacy with the viewer’s experience.
This large survey of work, spanning eight years, explores the idea that memory, place, and experience are based on an individual’s perception and haptic experience. Each work resembles a microcosm in documenting time and place through a human lens and humans’ intervention on nature.
Her sculptures address the dichotomies within existence – that there is both an inner world and a world outside your body, that humans live in a state of relatedness and are parts of a whole, as well as what it means to acknowledge and respond to nature. Oneness, a philosophical term that interweaves through Ruais’ work, represents a sense of interconnectedness – a transcendence of boundaries.
Brie Ruais (b. 1982, Southern California) lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. Ruais received her MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. Her practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works. Through her immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’ work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.
Ruais’ work has been exhibited at public institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, CA; The Everson, Syracuse, NY; Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Québec, Canada; the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and others. Awards and residencies include The Virginia Groot Foundation Grant (2021), and The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), among others.
This exhibition is made possible by the Tomayko Foundation, the Lydon Innovation Fund, JENDOCO Construction Corporation, and Aesthetic Plastic Surgery of Pittsburgh. General operating support is provided by Allegheny Regional Asset District, The Heinz Endowments, Cathy Raphael, Opportunity Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Elizabeth R. Raphael Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation, Anonymous Foundation, The George G Fund, Giant Eagle Foundation, and by private donations.
Contact
info@contemporarycraft.org
Contemporary Craft
5645 Butler Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15201
United States
Photos by Reagan West-Whitman
