Bio
Ruby T [b. 1986] is an artist, educator, and organizer. Her work is an experiment in translating fantasy to reality, and she is fueled by anger, desire, and magic. Rooted in drawing, her practice has offshoots in painting, print, fibers, comics, and video. She has exhibited and performed at Western Exhibitions, Roots & Culture, and Iceberg Projects in Chicago; Hales Gallery in New York; and Bass & Reiner in San Francisco. Her comics and illustrations have been published by Half Letter Press, and are in the collection of the Thomas J Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She lives and works in Provincetown, on Nauset and Wampanoag land.
Statement
Rooted in painting, drawing, performance, and fibers, my work is concerned with the power and limits of fantasy in the context of an oppressive social landscape. I work in years-long iterative spirals of inquiry and digestion.
Recently I’ve been contending with the landscape genre, and the Romanticist paintings that served as infrastructure for the nationalist mythology of the United States as “wild,” “untamed,” and “natural” i.e. ripe for colonization. In the studio—or in the dunes, meadow, ravine, etc.—I try to invert this infrastructure, or implode its function, through various actions: queer earth worship rituals; observational drawing; conversations with my ancestors.
The gripping desire, fear, and fantasy of belonging (which I believe fueled these historical constructions of the sublime, and still shape our current paradigm) become my infrastructure for painting. The resulting works are documents of this strange logic; as well as the proof or maybe detritus of affirming my non-belonging to the land I inhabit.
These paintings are built from the trappings of ritual and the precarity of working outside. I use silk, drop cloth, velvet, dye, oil, acrylic, and beads. Sometimes it gets too dark out to paint so I soak leftover silk in what remains of my pigments, or try to paint one last jagged dandelion leaf while it is still (barely) perceptible.
I often sew silk and drop cloth together because I am attracted to the joint between the smooth, expensive, worm-made strength of the silk and the rough, recycled fibers of the drop cloth, respun and manufactured to protect floors and furniture. The dye and paint behave so differently from one surface to the other, reminding me that conditions change everything.
I also come, on one side, from rag peddlers and tailors. For them, cloth made and structured life. And cloth is for life-making: for swaddling babies and shrouding dead bodies; for carrying belongings and staying warm; for protecting boats; for ritually adorning the living and dead.
I see this work as a kind of slow and unfolding magic, seeded in the potency of observational drawing. When I draw from life, I feel a part of its casual sacredness, and I am moved by its beauty to do it justice. I also slow down as I draw, and the shifted pace of my thoughts opens portals for new ways of seeing. I begin to feel and draw images that are just beyond my observation. What is a drawing that holds both literal and felt observations, the seen and the fantastical? It is a dream map of the radical present, a blueprint towards a more autonomous and magical belonging, and an offering back to the waves and flowers and clouds, as well to the sensations of my own human body.