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 received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016. She lives and works on Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Osage land, also known as Louisville, KY.
Artist 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 Romantic 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.
