Ruby Sky Stiler: Holding Up the Sky

"When the skies are going to fall, fall they will..."
     - excerpt from "The Revolutionary" by David Herbert Lawrence

She stares out at us  holding up the weight of ages.

At first glance, it seems odd to describe sculpture as consisting of two and three dimensions at the same time but looking at the work of Ruby Sky Stiler, it becomes clear that this is exactly her intention.  Stiler's intentions are grand and so are her models.

Th formal feeling in Stiler's figures evokes the caryatids, those stoic female figures who perform in perpetuity their hieratic functions on the Acropolis.  Stiler often makes use of classical models whose origins are obscure but usually attributed to the sculptors in early Greek states.  A fortuitous find at a yard sale, Ernest Arthur Gardener's 1905 classic  A Handbook of Ancient Greek Sculpture, and a subsequent visit to the ruins of Pompeii in Naples a few years, led to Bust of  a Woman,  confronting us with familiar forms and distant meanings.  Or, as Stiler titled her 2017, exhibition Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Inherited and Borrowed Types.

Her iconography also incorporates feminist imagery (the curved  arm raised as if in a dance). You can see the influence of Louise Bourgeois  in the fractured perspectives of Stiler's figures.  She often works in bas relief, the low relief sculpture often incorporated into the facades of buildings and also a strong feature of Native American pottery.

Ruby Sky Stiler was born in 1979 in Portland, Maine, studied art at the Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University.  At present she lives in Brooklyn Museum.   Stiler's work was included in the inaugural exhibition at the Wellin Museum of Art in 2012 on the occasion of the two hundredth anniversary of the college's founding.  Her work is on  display at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Neew York City.

Image: Ruby Sky Stiler - Bust of a Woman, 2014, glass, fiber, reinforced concrete,  Nicelle Beachine Gallery, NYC.