Spiked sun. The Hudson’s
Whittled down by ice.
I hear the bone dice
Of blown gravel clicking. Bone-pale, the recent snow
Fastens like fur to the river.
Standstill. We were leaving to deliver
Christmas presents when the tire blew
Last year. Above the dead valves pines
pared
Down by a storm stood, limbs bared . . .
I want you.

Albertz Benda proudly presents Bone dice, a new exhibition by Brie Ruais, now based in New Mexico. This marks Ruais' third exhibition with the gallery, featuring ceramic sculptures and a video installation. The exhibition traces the narrative and physical evolution of an artist who confronts the boundaries of her own body, reflected in the structure she imposes on her practice: each piece emerges from 130 pounds of clay, mirroring her physical weight. This body of work expands on Ruais' ongoing exploration of themes including relationality beyond an anthropocentric perspective, a deep engagement with materiality, feminism, embodiment, and the lived experience.

The exhibition's title draws inspiration from Louise Glück's poem Early December in Croton-on-Hudson, which, in just a dozen lines, begins with death and is filled with nature's voices, silence, and chance, culminating in desire. Ruais’ latest creations echo these themes, contemplating the relentless cycles of existence—birth and decay, life and death—not as opposing forces but as intertwined rhythms. Her work reflects on the moon’s cycle of presence and absence, the seasons shifting from dormancy to vitality, and growth as an impulse to flower, eventually decomposing into earth.

Settling in New Mexico heightened Ruais' sensitivity to lunar phases, deepening her communion with the elements: wind, fire, water, and earth. New Mexico is known for its high winds in the spring, which, according to Ruais, were instrumental in “pushing her forward”. As in Joan Jonas’ early film Wind, Ruais collaborates with these forces, performing what she calls "Wind Work," allowing her multi-sleeved garment to act like a weathervane, showing the direction of the wind and guiding her movement of clay. The resulting sculptures, Traveling with the wind, east and Traveling with the wind, west, unfurl as sweeping forms, clay torn and unfolded like fabric, revealing raw underbellies—a testament to the wind's power to expose, redirect, and reshape. In a video documenting her performance as well as her engagements with fire, earth and water, we witness the rhythmic turn of her days.

The moon and petaling forms in Ruais' work explore the effect of a knife's cut through clay. In Sharpening the edge of a knife on visibility (swapped pieces of her 130lbs) she slices through the clay terrain, creating an arcing division between the illuminated and shadowed sections of a phasing moon. This cutting gesture echoes in other works like Petaling inward, slicing outward where cuts birth forms that unfold and radiate from their centers. The ceramic surfaces, once concealed, emerge through red and pink glazed petals folding inward toward the sculpture's dense center, where the outward movement of Ruais' process began. The knife’s incision stirs surgical and violent utterances as well as the artist’s impulse to compose and articulate, revealing the dualism of the body's objecthood and selfhood.

In Returning to center, 130lbs, Ruais explores vulnerability and control, where torn clay strips curl inward toward a serpentine vertical axis, resembling a ribcage or cocoon. The sculpture's surface is a pale grey, unglazed but colored by a carbon-rich firing atmosphere. Glazed in hues of blood red, copper, and mauve, these strips, like bandages, cradle a void—a narrative of protection and return.

For Ruais, 2024 began with profound transitions—birth, death, and communion—echoing the universal human experience. The exhibition Bone dice invokes poetry’s approach to language and applies it to material: stretching, flexing, and reorienting its limits. Her practice embraces the torn, sensual underbelly in hues of red and pink, where a violent cut blossoms into growth, and where process (and life) is sometimes governed by chance, like a toss of the dice.