Brie Ruais

For her first solo exhibition at Seven Sisters, Ruais composes a site-specific installation with the requisite actors for an eclipse: the sun, the moon, and the Earth. In front of Performing the Eclipse of Three Bodies, 130lbs + 130lbs, 2023, surrounded by a radial arc of stones, the viewer is positioned as the fourth body in the cast of the penumbra: a space of partial illumination between a perfect shadow and full light. In the undefined margins between the sacred and profane and the magic of the night occurring during the day, Ruais engages with the wonder, uncertainty, and phenomena that ground our daily lives.

 

Ruais’ expansive and sculptural practice bridges Earth–, Body–, Performance–, and Video Art to gestural abstraction. With a meditated interiority, she forms the core of her work by using a volume of clay equivalent to her body's weight, and enacts metaphorical performances through strength, movement, and intention. The sculptural forces of her work often echo environmental characteristics, such as weather extremes, fissures, fractures, geological formations, and the physical boundaries that define the tension of human development pressing against untamed nature. In Performing Water Flowing's reflective, deep blue glazes, Brie leaps into a new element, embodying currents as they ripple over rocks and navigate bends. In her movements, Ruais submits to phases of change and feelings that our bodies know before our minds understand.

 

With time and temperature, malleable clay is fired to crystallize the ephemeral and firm peaks, expose fissures, and memorialize hollows from Ruais’ knuckles, fingerprints, elbows, and knees. Impressions from the energetic expansion of her limbs read like modern petroglyphs, recordings of the artist’s time on Earth. She embeds these works with a primal energy filled with clues and questions that relate to pre-cognitive understanding, intuition, and ancient ways of knowing. 

In the summer of 2021, the Moody Center for the Arts presented Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land, the first institutional solo exhibition of the sculptor Brie Ruais curated by Frauke V. Josenhans. "The artist creates large-scale abstract ceramic pieces, which operate on the scale of an individual body yet dynamically engage the architectural or natural environment. Employing her own physical features and bodily force as an artistic tool, the sculptures are shaped by this burst of energy. The artist’s movement-based practice is legible through the scrapes, gouges, and gestures embedded in the surfaces and forms of the ceramic works.  Each sculpture is made with the equivalent of her body weight in clay, resulting in human-scale works that forge an intimacy with the viewer’s body. Through her collaborative engagement with raw materials like clay, dirt, and gravel, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that calls us to examine our relationship to the land.

 

The exhibition featured a monumental installation of ceramic works, created specifically for the exhibition at the Moody, and displayed in dialogue with a series of new photographs and a video installation that documented ephemeral interventions on the land. Arranged on both the floor and walls, the sculptures  interacted with the galleries and the Rice campus, referencing the post-industrial transformation of the American West. A site-specific work made in two parts engaged both the natural grounds outside the building, as well as the man-made container within."

 

  

Photographs by Nash Baker and Oliver Halkowich