Chelsea Outing Saturday Nov. 14 with Artist Casey Ruble

Meet at Gagosian Gallery, 555 West 24th Street
Subway: A/C/E to 23rd St.
Scavenger hunt with artist and critic Casey Ruble.

Originally inspired by a pair of Edo-period Japanese screens depicting the Genpei Wars, Casey Ruble’s cutout battlescene paintings revolve around the desire to produce harmony within conflict. Costumed mounted warriors are set within natural elements (flowering trees, flocks of birds, wildfires) inspired by Asian landscapes. The paintings mix Western and Eastern pictorial conventions: Spatially, they are flattened in the style of traditional Japanese painting (in places descending into an almost purely abstract cacophany of shapes, patterns, and colors); simultaneously, they are punctuated by three-dimensionally rendered figures derived from the High Renaissance, Baroque, and Romantic periods. Compositionally, they are controlled in the manner of Hard-Edge Abstraction yet also narrative-driven in the tradition of Persian pictorial art. The patterning on the costumes comes from far-ranging sources including Islamic architecture, Chinese lattices, Art Nouveau designs, and 1960s op-art geometries. Disparate in geography and time as these inspirations may be, they are all about, in some sense, how we attempt to create order in the face of chaos. By cutting the paintings out, Casey deprives the figures of a cohesive, perspective-oriented space in which to exist. This reinforces the hermetic nature of the spatial/compositional system and emphasizes the visual relationships between the figures and the natural elements in which they are placed.

Abstractly depicting the moment of contact on the battlefield, the paintings in the i, ro, ha, etc. series are based on Japanese crests designs. Historically, Japanese crests were used during peaceful times as ornamentation for the costumes of courtiers and were later appropriated by warriors to identify opposing factions on the battlefield. For these paintings, I overlapped several crests, painted in the areas of overlap, and erased the remainder of the designs to produce new geometric arrangements that combine disorder and structure in much the same fashion as the figurative works do. The titles of these paintings are based on Japanese kana syllabary.

Although they are also executed in gouache, Casey calls the paintings in her third body of work drawings because they are more experimental in nature. The pieces in the drawing I section are mostly about trying to reconcile narrative and strict compositional structure. More conceptually based, the pieces in the drawing II section explore the intersections of different visual and linguistic communication systems.

Casey Ruble's Biography
Born and raised on a ranch outside Billings, Montana, Casey Ruble grew up bird hunting with her father and horseback riding with her mother, both of which subsequently influenced her work. After graduating from Smith College in 1995, Casey lived in New Orleans and Chicago and eventually settled in New York to pursue her MFA at Hunter College, where she finished her graduate degree in 2002.

Casey is represented by Foley Gallery (www.foleygallery.com) and her work has been included in group shows both here and abroad, including at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, Parker's Box, and Black & White Gallery. Casey currently holds an artist-in-residence position at Fordham University, and has taught as an adjunct at Fordham, Yeshiva Stern, and Fairleigh Dickinson University. Casey works as a freelance writer for Art in America and has taught an art criticism course sponsored by High 5’s TRaC program. Casey have also curated and assistant-curated several exhibitions in New York.

Casey’s curatorial projects have been reviewed in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Brooklyn Rail, and Sculpture Magazine.