In the darkened back room of Night Gallery’s massive new warehouse space, five of Brie Ruais’s large circular ceramic works appeared to be hovering on the walls. Each piece, individually spotlit with rings of white light, referenced a lunar phase. The alabaster Spreading Outward, Full Moon, 130lbs and onyx Spreading Outward, New Moon, 130lbs, both 2023, bookended the cycle. As usual, Ruais starts each piece with a chunk of clay that weighs as much as she does, pounds it into shape, and then rips the resulting form into manageable portions that are ultimately fired and screwed to the wall. This process is visible in the mottled surfaces of the works themselves, but is also further emphasized in Daughter, You Seem Foreign to Me, 2023, an accompanying video that was projected on the wall as a circle instead of the typical cinematic rectangle—a form that mirrors the shape of her celestial ceramics. The film put us in Ruais’s body, showing us the strenuous job of spreading the clay from her perspective. In another section of footage, there is an overhead view of her pushing and mashing the clay, ostensibly by moonlight. The intensity of the physical struggle Ruais experiences with her material is heightened by the pulse of her labored breathing, the video’s primary sound component. The overt connections made between the feminine body, the moon, the landscape, and art as labor lent the dimly lit installation a slightly moody, if not witchy, vibe. Ruais, however, isn’t replicating overwrought “female” tropes, but is bravely tackling and interrogating these loaded mythoi.
The artist’s encounters with the clay are indexed on the works’ surfaces: We saw evidence of a footprint, what looked like the press of a knee or the side of a palm, and long ridges where her fingers pushed the material outward. Glaze pools in these pockets—indeed, Spreading Outward, New Moon, 130lbs is a diverse ecosystem of textures and glosses. On this piece, an inky, shimmering expanse borders a crackly, almost scaly field of cerulean, while an artful swipe of pearlescent turquoise butts up against tiny lagoons of slightly translucent black-blue agate. In the video, another basin of pigment appears in a depiction of an abandoned New Mexican gold mine flooded with water, its aquamarine surface not unlike the artist’s milky glazes. Other sections further connect the ceramics with the landscape of the American Southwest. The video offers views of a desert trail as well as an aerial shot of a lone figure steadily marching up an arid incline, all punctuated by Ruais’s staccato breaths. This aural texture became the soundtrack for the entire show, assuring that the artist’s labor was omnipresent as viewers surveyed the sculptures.
Ruais, who recently moved to Santa Fe after working in New York for twenty-two years, is now part of a tradition of artists decamping from the city to the Southwest and enmeshing their practices with its mythic scenery. Georgia O’Keeffe’s fierce desert independence, as well as Agnes Martin’s decision in 1967 to drive west in a white pickup truck by herself to create a new life, are the stuff of legend. One can groan about these romanticized tales of white women going into the desolate wilderness to labor alone, but it’s hard not to be enthralled by their courage (tinged by more than a little audacious self-mythologizing). Attesting to her own impossibly resolved self-sufficiency, Martin once quipped: “There’s so many people that don’t know what they want, and I think that in this world that’s the only thing you have to know: exactly what you want most.” Mercifully, that kind of rigid certainty was absent from this show. Ruais takes a different approach to representing women working in the desert. Her art is steeped in unknowingness, exploration, and improvisation. Daughter, You Seem Foreign to Me, also the title of the exhibition, is based on a conversation the artist had with her mother, who is living with dementia. Attempting to seek out a memory is a bit like trying to locate a new moon in the night sky, searching for a trace of something that we know is there but cannot find. It is a thing both absent and present, like a fingerprint left in a slab of clay.
