Sterling Ruby
The Flower Cutter Rests on Dust Covered Steps

The first room contains the imposingly large Basin Theology/Dracula Boat ceramic resembling a grave or the gothic ship Demeter, while symbolizing the transition between the living and the underworld. Broken pieces arranged inside its large crater recall excavations or aerial views of ravaged landscapes. The varied surfaces and metallic glazes lend a simultaneously ancient and futuristic quality to the works. Creating these works involves a process of multiple firings; the glazes are thick, resembling rich, luridly vibrant lava or burnt embers. Of the similar MORTAR ceramics, Ruby has stated, “I am smashing all of my previous attempts, and futile, contemporary gestures, and placing them into a mortar, and grinding them down with a blunt pestle.”

Ruby’s ceramic FLOWERS hang on the walls—visceral, sensual, and animalistic, with lobe-like petals whose articulated stems resemble vertebrae. Formally they echo Lucio Fontana’s ceramic crucifixes, and the pockmarked holes that adorn their surfaces also recall Fontana’s violent gestures.

In DRFTRS collages, images of dried flowers, orchids, forest fires, funeral flower arrangements, and geological formations float unsettlingly. The artist has repurposed the covers of macabre pulp novels from the 1970s. A lurid graphic of a vine with red-tipped thorns and a red flower connotes both petals and blood and harkens to Ruby’s earlier use of blood-red drips. Another collage takes the stark-white titles from four of these books, Petals on the Wind, Flowers in the Attic, Garden of Shadows, If There Be Thorns.

Flowers reappear in the artist’s cast FP (Flower Power) sculptures whose slender forms resemble rifles or bayonets. These works take their title and form from a news photograph made during the height of 1960s anti-war protests in the US: amid heightened tension, a lone protestor is shown placing wilting carnation flowers into the barrels of rifles on the steps of the Pentagon building. These somber, elongated sculptures are made in a process of sand-casting aluminum, the flowers and wood structures are pressed and buried into the ground in order to create the forms. The ghostly patina of the artwork is achieved through layering white over black pigment, resulting in an ashen, volcanic appearance. They stand like totemic or memorial objects, the flowers placed reverently as offerings.

In exquisite black and white ink-on-paper drawings, the artist taps into an unseen elemental energy. Delicate lines become dark, obsessive-compulsive black holes; a mathematical precision has gone off the rails. We see flowers, leaves, sunflowers, webs, a pinwheel off its axis. One drawing echoes the shape of Ruby’s FLOWER ceramics, but here the flower form becomes a dark being with lowered wings. The natural world is depicted as a site of primal becoming.

The Flower Cutter Rests on Dust Covered Steps culminates in a series of TURBINE paintings created with thick oil stick paint and spattered cardboard collaged elements on raw or dyed canvas. Rectangular fragments of dirty, stained cardboard delineate edges and borders, set apart as if two sides are engaged in eternal struggle. In other TURBINE works, the collaged pieces are stacked like stairs or steps. These paintings evoke the late works of painter J.M.W. Turner, in which seascapes seem to obliterate into abstraction, as well as the radical social upheaval of Futurist and Russian Constructivist painting. In Ruby’s own turbulent seas, opposing forces conflict in furious bursts of yellow, red and black, evoking the current political and environmental turmoil taking its toll on the global collective psyche. Could these be contemporary depictions of oblivion, visions of histories past, or a future yet to be written?