Ruby T: Mega Meadow Liquidation

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Ruby T offers paintings that are meditations on the fraught genre of landscape painting through the lens of ecstatic queer earth worship. Mega Meadow Liquidation opens in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions, Chicago on June 23 with a free public reception from 5 to 8 pm and will run through August 12. 

The paintings in this show feature grass, flowers, water, and leaves that float and slip across scraps of marbled silk and beaded tendrils. Some imagery is rendered with a quick and cartooning hand while other moments are slow, observational, and meticulous. Ruby creates her painting surfaces by stitching together and embroidering silk and drop cloth. The effect is a collision of texture, structure, and meaning; not unlike the meadows of the so-called United States, which are both teeming with vibrant plant and animal life, as well as centuries of trauma and dispossession.

Ruby made these paintings during and shortly after a residency at Shandaken, which takes place in a meadow on Lenape land, very close to the home and studio of transcendentalist landscape painter Thomas Cole. Thomas Cole and his romanticist Hudson River School cohort created paintings that served as infrastructure for the nationalist mythology of the United States as “wild,” “untamed,” and “natural” i.e. ripe for colonization. Ruby went to the meadow with a desire to spiritually affirm her non-belonging to that land and redirect her own transcendentalist and earth-loving tendencies toward an inverted, or queer, project of deconstructing Cole’s mythology of landscape painting. Meditations, private performances, and rituals gave way to a tangle of images and stories which she then translated into the works in this exhibition.

In Meadow Composite Wholesale Liquidation Transcendence Blowout, meadows and grasses from the Hudson River Valley and Provincetown stack and dip beyond each others’ borders, zooming in and out of rendering, as Ruby’s fear of losing sight of them (to the dark; to their destruction) makes her paint them more quickly. In Flower Gut System, the artist’s intestines merge with the meadow’s root systems, creating a warped and gnarled digestion system that bulges and shrinks as sea levels rise and super shopping centers continue to liquidate and liquidate so hard that they turn into meadows again and certain flowers and grasses are still deep in the earth, waiting.

This is Ruby T’s second solo show at Western Exhibitions and she has had solo and two-person exhibitions in Chicago at Randy Alexander Gallery, Roots & Culture and The Back Room at Kim’s Corner Food. Group exhibitions and screenings include Hales Gallery in New York; Hyde Park Art Center, Iceberg Projects, Weinberg/ Newton Gallery, Gallery 400, ACRE Projects, and Roman Susan, all in Chicago; and at Monaco in St. Louis. Her work has been written about and reviewed in the Chicago Tribune, Newcity, The Chicago Reader, and Chicago Artist Writers. Ruby T received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and lives and works in Provincetown, Mass.

Pictured: Meadow Composite Wholesale Liquidation Transcendence Blowout, 2023, oil, acrylic, and machine embroidery on silk and dropcloth, 32 x 23.5 inches