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Ruby Palmer | Assembly
Solo exhibition, 13 May - 30 July 2021
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Ruby Palmer | Assembly: Solo exhibition

Past exhibition
  • Installation Views
  • Works
  • Press release
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Installation Views
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Newinstall 7
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Newinstall
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Newinstall 3
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Newinstall 5
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Newinstall 2
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Newinstall 8
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Install 2
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Install 3
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Install
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup: Rpalmer Install 9
Works
  • Ruby Palmer, Wall Dance II, 2019
    Ruby Palmer, Wall Dance II, 2019
  • Ruby Palmer, Quilter's Lament, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Quilter's Lament, 2020
  • Ruby Palmer, Wrap Around, 2019
    Ruby Palmer, Wrap Around, 2019
  • Ruby Palmer, Blue Floor, 2018
    Ruby Palmer, Blue Floor, 2018
  • Ruby Palmer, Bright Blue Leaf, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Bright Blue Leaf, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Reds, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Reds, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Pink Green Stack, 2019
    Ruby Palmer, Pink Green Stack, 2019
  • Ruby Palmer, Listening to Roni Horn, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Listening to Roni Horn, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Spine, 2019
    Ruby Palmer, Spine, 2019
  • Ruby Palmer, Rainbow Stack, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Rainbow Stack, 2020
  • Ruby Palmer, Blue Orange Stack, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Blue Orange Stack, 2020
  • Ruby Palmer, Ampersand, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Ampersand, 2020
  • Ruby Palmer, Sister Golden Hair, 2019
    Ruby Palmer, Sister Golden Hair, 2019
  • Ruby Palmer, Take a Peak, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Take a Peak, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Blue/Pink, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Blue/Pink, 2020
  • Ruby Palmer, Kind of Sporty, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Kind of Sporty, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Wave, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Wave, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Blue Trap, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Blue Trap, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Green as Glass, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Green as Glass, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, 1.9% Scandinavian, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, 1.9% Scandinavian, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Turquoise and Blue on Dark Grey, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Turquoise and Blue on Dark Grey, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Purple and Green on Light Turquoise, 2021
    Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Purple and Green on Light Turquoise, 2021
  • Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Black with Yellow on Bright Blue, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Black with Yellow on Bright Blue, 2020
  • Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Swirl, 2020
    Ruby Palmer, Flower Series: Swirl, 2020
Press release

Morgan Lehman is very pleased to present “Assembly”, Ruby Palmer’s third solo exhibition with the gallery since 2004.

 

Ruby Palmer’s new wall constructions and cut paper pieces occupy her favorite format: the liminal space between painting and sculpture. Though decidedly three-dimensional, Palmer’s works never quite leave the flatness of the wall, for reasons the artist attributes to her formal education as a painter who learned to see and depict within the limits of two dimensions. That training informs but never quite dictates her approach, which also pays special attention to surface, materiality, and the dynamics of light and shadow. Palmer’s hybrid pieces deliberately engage with both pictorial space and actual space, asking viewers to experience them from different vantage points and distances.

 

In her studio, Palmer utilizes an improvisational methodology to assemble, modify, reassemble, redact, and reassemble again, relying on a spirit of play and exploration to fuel each studio session. The organic way in which Palmer’s artwork takes shape brings to mind the sorts of generative processes that occur in the natural world, including crystallization and plant growth. Like branches sprouting from branches, each assemblage is born of parts that interconnect and affect each other, an associative network of forms.

 

Though her work relies on repeated forms and is often inspired by ornamental motifs and artifacts from human history, Palmer resists the decorative by insisting on the structural. Each construction is a matrix that relies on the ingenuity of its own engineering to literally stay on the wall and support itself. Further, the artist’s interest in pattern-based architectures has less to do with some notion of perfect repetition (Fibonacci’s sequence, e.g.), but rather, considers the exciting possibilities of what happens when glitches or hiccups are introduced into such systems. Instead of geometry we encounter off-geometry, instead of rigidity, expressiveness. In this way, Palmer’s work rejoices in the idiosyncratic and imperfect, finding beauty in wonkiness and playful delight in the process of making itself.

 

Ruby Palmer was born in Boston, MA and grew up in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Trained as an abstract painter at Hampshire College (BA 1988-92), she started experimenting with sculpture and installation at the School of Visual Arts in NYC (MFA 1998-2000). In 1999 she was awarded a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors. In March 2020, several of Palmer’s large constructions were included in a group exhibition at the Albany International Airport (NY). Ruby has exhibited her work at the Woodstock Byrdcliff Guild, (Woodstock, NY ); Opalka Gallery (Albany, NY); LABspace (Hillsdale, NY); Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY); The Samuel Dorsky Museum (New Paltz, NY); Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC); Page Bond Gallery (Richmond, VA); Geoffrey Young Gallery (Great Barrington, MA); Instar Lodge (Germantown, NY); and Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY). In 2016, the artist founded ARTalks, an artist lecture series held at the Morton Memorial Library in Rhinecliff, NY. Palmer has worked and lived in Rhinecliff since 2011.

 

 

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Related artist

  • Ruby Palmer

    Ruby Palmer

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