It's What's in the Ether

Figures recline on the backs of horses, nestle into swans, merge with serpents in gestures that read as both consumption and embrace. A cat carries a naked woman as tenderly as a mother carries a child. They rest on clouds and exhale them, breathing out the same atmosphere that holds them. These are not the fabulous and frantic women of Ruby Neri's previous sculptures—those glazed ceramic figures tangled in wild-eyed intensity and the voltage of desire. Here, something softer has taken hold. It's What's in the Ether is what remains when everything burns. After a year of profound loss—the fires that took her home and archive, her studio in transition, the deep dive into her father's, artist Manuel Neri, estate—Neri has built her garden of Eden here. Naked figures wander among fantastical flora and fauna in a Hieronymus Bosch landscape drained of aggression, refilled with tenderness. Serpents support rather than tempt. Horses hold steady rather than bolt. Bodies are unencumbered by possessions or intent, held only by creatures who ask nothing in return. The work gathers everything into a single colorful and complete composition: animals, gardens, female bodies. There is urgency to this abundance, as if assembling all the elements might preserve something essential, might keep the puzzle whole when its pieces keep vanishing. The work is regenerative the way burning forests regenerate—ash, then new growth. Neri works in her signature medium of hand-built ceramic, her surfaces activated with sprayed and painted glazes that link her practice to the street art of her youth. She shows off her skills as both sculptor and painter–the colors saturated yet primary; red, blue, yellow and green. Animals and figures merge and support one another across vessels and sculptures that refuse hierarchy between decoration and structure, between carrying and being carried. What persists in It's What's in the Ether is not the house or the archive but the impulse to build, to gather, to create shelter in clay and glaze and wild imagination. The garden Neri has made offers a place to rest inside contradiction: loss and renewal, uncertainty and tenderness, the knowledge that we are suspended in forces we cannot control and the brief freedom of floating within them. This marks Ruby Neri's 4th solo exhibition with Salon 94.