A fuchsia brighter than hell

New work by Ruby T

Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Louisville-based artist, Ruby T. A fuchsia brighter than hell will open Saturday, March 28 from 5:00 - 7:30 PM and be on view through April 25, 2026.

Ruby T’s multidisciplinary practice—spanning painting, drawing, performance, and fibers—examines the power and limitations of fantasy within an oppressive social landscape. In this new body of stitched and painted works, the artist contends with the psychic and visual overload produced by rapid-fire media consumption, translating its fragmentation into layered, materially rich compositions.

Developed during and following a recent move to Kentucky, the work takes as a conceptual point of departure the HELL IS REAL billboard along I-65 in northwest Indiana. Ruby reframes “hell” as both an immediate political condition and a tool of ideological control—at once lived reality and projected threat. Across these works, she constructs a symbolic lexicon of scrolls, flames, amphitheaters, clouds, and faces, set against densely collaged surfaces of silk, velvet, drop cloth, and wood.

Moving fluidly between observation and fantasy, Ruby saturates her compositions with fuchsia, embracing both its chromatic instability and its conceptual resonance through Gertrude Stein’s linguistic play, where “future” gives way to “fuchsia.” This substitution resists linear time, insisting instead on a recursive present: as it was, as it is… not to the future, but to the fuchsia.

Anchoring the exhibition is the large-scale, quilt-like tapestry Daffodil power tower season, in which a red, tongue-like scroll emerges from a vertiginous amphitheater. Here, Ruby invokes the Tower card from tarot—a symbol of upheaval, rupture, and radical transformation. Through intricate passages of beaded and marbled silk and pieced velvet, she imbues the work with tenderness and devotion, foregrounding the emotional and collective labor required to endure and move through periods of instability.

This act of bearing witness extends into two paintings depicting audiences watching a town hall featuring Erika Kirk and Bari Weiss. These works position the artist as both observer and participant, drawing on the compositional language of religious history painting while reflecting on contemporary spectatorship. Together, the exhibition holds space for contradiction, attention, and shared reckoning within an unfolding and uncertain present.