EXHIBITION  IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE

July 13 – 31, 2013 | Opening reception: Saturday,  July 13,  5-8 pm

HALSEY MCKAY is pleased to present, Two Wholes, an exhibition by Brie Ruais. Ruais makes ceramic sites based on the weight of bodies – her own or a combination of hers with another.  On her hands and knees, hundreds of pounds of clay are laboriously spread out from a large mound and pushed to the clay’s limits.  The results of this process are tiled, gestural ceramic wall reliefs that bear a relationship to action-painting, Gutai, AbEx, and Nauman’s repetitive actions. For the exhibition, and with the East End in mind, Ruais addresses formal and associative doubling – two rings, the bay and the ocean, Pollock and Krasner, two lovers, two bodies, two wholes.

Two Wholes features two large-scale ceramic wall pieces, though the visitor will view them as three.  In Inside Folded Out, 132 lbs. (The artist’s body weight in clay spread out then folded open from the center), the center of the site is opened up and peeled back, creating an amorphous ring.   In How One Can Be Two, 300 lbs. (Two people’s combined body weight in clay), a circular form is torn out from the middle and set aside, resulting in two pieces: a ring that used to be whole, and a circle that had once been part of something larger.   These two parts constantly refer back to one another, confusing the sense of their autonomy as objects. Metaphorically, the works’ vain gestures of excavation reveal a center or origin that proves to be in constant evasion. The scale of the works with their muscular gestures in clay, make clear that they are the result of one artist’s action as it relates to terrain, architecture, the body, and the mapping of movement.

 

Brie Ruais was born in 1982, in Southern California. She received her BA from NYU in 2004 followed by an MFA from Columbia University’s School of the Arts in 2011. She now lives and works in New York City. Recent exhibitions have been with Nicole Klagsbrun, The Horticultural Society of New York, Salon 94, Abrons Art Center and Eli Ping in New York as well as at Xavier Hufkens in Brussels.


 

 

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