Brie Ruais: Bone Dice

NEW YORK, NY - albertz benda proudly presents Bone Dice, a new exhibition by Brie Ruais, now based in New Mexico. This marks Ruais' third exhibition with the gallery, featuring ceramic sculptures and a video installation. The exhibition traces the narrative and physical evolution of an artist who confronts the boundaries of her own body, reflected in the structure she imposes on her practice: each piece emerges from 130 pounds of clay, mirroring her physical weight. This body of work expands on Ruais' ongoing exploration of themes including relationality beyond an anthropocentric perspective, a deep engagement with materiality, feminism, embodiment, and the lived experience.

 

The exhibition's title draws inspiration from Louise Glück's poem "Early December in Croton-on-Hudson," which, in just a dozen lines, begins with death and is filled with nature's voices, silence, and chance, culminating in desire. Ruais’ latest creations echo these themes, contemplating the relentless cycles of existence—birth and decay, life and death—not as opposing forces but as intertwined rhythms. Her work reflects on the moon’s cycle of presence and absence, the seasons shifting from dormancy to vitality, and growth as an impulse to flower.

 

Settling in New Mexico heightened Ruais' sensitivity to the elements: wind, fire, water, and earth. New Mexico is known for its high winds in the spring, which, according to Ruais, were instrumental in “finding possibility in what feels like resistance”. Inspired by Joan Jonas’ early film "Wind," Ruais collaborates with these forces, performing what she calls "Wind Work," allowing her multi-sleeved garment to act like a weathervane, guiding the direction of her movements. The resulting sculptures, Traveling with the Wind, East and Traveling with the Wind, West, unfurl as sweeping forms, clay torn and flying loose like fabric —a testament to the wind's power to expose and reorient.

 

In a 12 minute video, “Four Phrases”, Ruais collaborates with poet Caitlin Lorraine Johnson to compose a textual piece that describes the nature of Ruais’ labor. This four part video illuminates the choreographies Ruais developed alongside wind, ocean waves, expansive desert terrain, and a snow-covered field.   

 

Several works in the show explore the effect of a gesture made with a tool: a knife's cut through clay. In Sharpening the Edge of a Knife on Visibility (Swapped Pieces of Her 130lbs) she slices through the clay, creating an arcing division between the illuminated and shadowed sections of a phasing moon. This cutting gesture echoes in other works like Petaling Inward, Slicing Outward where cuts birth forms that unfold and radiate from their centers. The ceramic surfaces, once concealed, emerge through red and pink glazed petals folding inward toward the sculpture's dense center.  The knife’s incision stirs surgical and violent utterances as well as the artist’s impulse to articulate her investigation into the dualistic nature of selfhood and objecthood.

 

Ruais’ movements originate with intuitive choreographies she develops in various landscapes: solitude in the desert, grief at a bedside, awe in a storm, and joy in communion. Her work embraces the raw, sensual underbelly of the lived experience, where a violent cut blossoms into growth, and where process (and life) is sometimes governed by chance, like a toss of the dice.