2024 Tomayko Solo Artist Elevation Series
Oneness features works by New Mexico based artist, Brie Ruais. Ruais focuses on ideas around mapping places geographically, psychologically, and experientially. Made from the artist’s body weight in clay, Ruais’ work inherently addresses the experience of embodiment: movement-based artwork that forges an intimacy with the viewer’s experience.
This large survey of work, spanning eight years, explores the idea that memory, place, and experience are based on an individual’s perception and haptic experience. Each work resembles a microcosm in documenting time and place through a human lens and humans’ intervention on nature.
Her sculptures address the dichotomies within existence – that there is both an inner world and a world outside your body, that humans live in a state of relatedness and are parts of a whole, as well as what it means to acknowledge and respond to nature. Oneness, a philosophical term that interweaves through Ruais’ work, represents a sense of interconnectedness – a transcendence of boundaries.
This exhibition is made possible by the Tomayko Foundation, the Lydon Innovation Fund, JENDOCO Construction Corporation, and Aesthetic Plastic Surgery of Pittsburgh. General operating support is provided by Allegheny Regional Asset District, The Heinz Endowments, Cathy Raphael, Opportunity Fund, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the Elizabeth R. Raphael Fund of The Pittsburgh Foundation, Anonymous Foundation, The George G Fund, Giant Eagle Foundation, and by private donations.
Image courtesy Brie Ruais and Albertz Benda, New York | Los Angeles
