Foxy Production is pleased to present New Work, STERLING RUBY’s second New York solo exhibition. With a growing reputation for distinctive and complex work, Ruby boldly crosses boundaries while hooking the viewer into a searing visceral experience. Vibrant, troubling, intensely visual, his work presents decentered psychological and physical states. Working across disciplines, including collage, drawing, photography, sculpture, video and performance, Ruby is concerned with the interstices between freedom and control, expression and silence, the individual and the communal.

In New Work, Ruby furthers his investigations of memory and embodiment through techniques that push accepted forms to their limits. Two large works on paper, Prime Mover 1 & 2, moodily consider the complexities of cultural and personal autonomy. Biomorphic structures – both geometric and organic – connect with fields of black spray-paint to a underlay of web-like shapes, while images of a knife, a ceramic plate, tears and drips remain discrete, unable to be readily incorporated into a body or system.

Ruby’s sculptural works evoke organic forms that slip between definitions. Orange Inanimate Torso is an iridescent sculpture made with resin, PVC and wood. It has a spray-painted overlay, and is placed upon a black veneer pedestal. The work appears to combine organic and human remains in a disturbing scene reminiscent of both a body on a mortuary slab, and a conventional figurative civic sculpture.

Ruby’s prints energize the possibilities of photographic collage. Cry is a large, richly layered digital photograph where the word “cry” is imposed upon images of stone, wood, metal and tools. This primordial environment speaks of basic survival, of humanity pared back to the elemental.

His new paper collage series explores and critiques the construction of the “natural”. He presents images of flora and fauna that may seem cohesive from a distance, yet on closer inspection become jarring. Through these disjunctions, Ruby creates an understated yet powerful sense of spatial disruption and unease.