the sun & us (Invisible Performance)

Expanding her exploration of drawing as a time-based act informed by her surroundings, Ruby Jean Waterhouse presents a site-specific installation of suspended silk sculptures, harnessing the power of sunlight to generate patterns and forms that act as records of time, space, and our interaction with our environment.

Using a cyanotype technique to transform these sculptural forms into receptive surfaces, Waterhouse employs the sun as her collaborator as its movements and rhythms create marks and forms across them. Generating a space imbued with physical traces of the past and a sense of the mystical powers of nature, she plays with the simultaneous existence of stillness and motion—the hanging forms both stationary and gently fluttering, the sun’s drawings both chronicled and quietly ongoing.

Over the course of the show, a selection of these sculptures will undergo a process of live exposure, beginning with their submersion in cyanotype solution on the opening day, and ending with their ritualistic rinsing on the closing day, stopping the development process. As those in the space interact with the works, traces of them will become imprinted on their forms, expanding the collaboration to one of incidental participation.

Visitors to the space are invited to experience and consider the often unnoticed presence of the sun in our everyday lives, its power, and our relationship with this celestial body.