NEW YORK, NY.- It is said that the body holds experiences and memories in ways that the mind does not. Expanding on themes of embodiments addressed in Ruais’s recent institutional exhibition at the Moody Center for the Arts, the artist transmutes the body in clay as forms emerge through material confrontation and collaboration. On view from December 9, 2021 though January 22, 2022, Ruais’s second solo show with the gallery, Some Things I Know About Being in Body further reflects upon the relationship between an individual's psychical interior world and the corporeal exterior world.

Each sculpture begins with 130 pounds of clay - the artists’ body weight – that is shaped by and embedded with Ruais’s movements: spreading out, pushing, tearing open, and scraping away. The work is created by performing a foundational movement Ruais began working with 10 years ago: "Spreading Outward from Center," which was cultivated from the idea that the individual’s experience of the world is centered in the body. The forms that emerge from these gestures are circular and call to mind emanations, geological terrains, and “central core” imagery.

In August 2021, Ruais visited a small New Mexican clay quarry to harvest wild clay for the first time. Collecting only with her hands, Ruais peeled the skin of drying clay from the muddy basin, and crumbled clay from the cliff face. After filling up a truck bed with hundreds of pounds of clay, she set up her drone camera, descended into the pond of clay at the base of the mine, and developed a set of performative gestures relating to the place.

In this new body of work, Ruais brings the gestures developed in the quarry into the works made in her Brooklyn studio and adds one more movement to the score: "Making Space in the Center." The voids created by this gesture are legible as passageways, portals, and wounds. Also on view is Digging In, Digging Out, 2021, an aerial video of the artist’s performance in the clay quarry, where she engages, embeds, and emerges from the wet clay. The mining gestures are further implemented in the gallery’s architecture by gouging holes into the walls through the sculptures.

In an ongoing search for understanding the depth of the self, others, and the world, these voids reveal the struggle and pleasure of this search; for the work begins as raw, guttural expression, then transforms, through fire, into powerfully beautiful objects.

The artist would like to thank the Virginia A. Groot Foundation, Studio Scala, New Mexico, Denise Lynch, the Ruais family and Gaia for making this work possible.

Brie Ruais [b. 1982, Southern California] lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from Columbia University's School of the Arts in 2011. Ruais’ 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 immersive engagement with clay, Ruais’s work generates a physical and sensorial experience that explores a new dialogue between the body and the earth.

Her 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; The Anderson Collection, Stanford University, Stanford, CA; Musée d’art de Joliette, Joliette, Québec, Canada; The Southern Utah Museum of Art, Cedar City, UT; the Katzen Center at American University, Washington, DC and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Her first institutional solo exhibition, Brie Ruais: Movement at the Edge of the Land, opened in June 2021 at The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX. Awards and residencies include The Virginia Groot Foundation Grant (2021), The Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2018), The Sharpe Walentas Studio Program (2018), Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship (2014), among others. Ruais' work is in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Pennsylvania Academy of Art, Philadelphia, PA; TD Bank, US; Matamoros Art In Embassies Collection, Mexico; the Pizzuti Collection, OH; and the BurgerCollection Hong Kong. She is featured in Vitamin C: New Perspectives in Contemporary Art, Clay and Ceramics, published by Phaidon (2017).