Ruby Bailey
Fragments of an Absence
08/16 – 08/30
Members Preview: 08/15/2025
Opening Reception: 08/16/2025

Exhibition Statement:

Ruby Bailey’s practice explores how we process memory, identity, and emotion through digital systems and symbolic language. Working across sculpture, installation, and video, she creates visually layered, tactile environments that draw from both personal experience and shared online aesthetics.

In this exhibition, Bailey presents a selection of her ongoing infinity paintings - modular, wall-based sculptures made from laser-cut white steel and magnetic UV-printed vinyl. These works blur the line between painting and object. Designed to be touched and rearranged, each piece acts as a kind of interactive archive: magnetic components hold collaged prints of altered photographs, screenshots, text, and symbols drawn from Bailey’s personal index of memories and digital references. Mouse cursors, fragments of grass from The Sims, aeroplanes, building facades, and fragments of text appear again and again, creating a visual language that is deeply coded yet emotionally resonant.

Language ~ both textual and visual ~ is central to Bailey’s approach. In each work, phrases like type or paste your content here or here is the greener grass are laser-cut directly into the steel. Some words remain as powder-coated outlines; others are fully cut away, leaving ghostlike absences. These texts are only partially legible, meant to be pieced together with the title, the materials, and the viewer’s own interpretations. Interspersed throughout are fragments of digital punctuation that act as ambient syntax, referencing user interfaces and the hidden architectures of online space.

Though grounded in digital aesthetics, Bailey’s infinity paintings are deliberately physical. They require close viewing and slow interaction. Each element is designed to shift - like memory itself - with time, touch, and perspective. 

The exhibition also includes Bailey’s film 0cean, a digital video work that expands the symbolic world of the infinity paintings into a time-based medium. In 0cean, the same images and motifs - grass, cursors, water, emojis, wireframe tools - glitch, ripple, and dissolve across the surface of an infinite digital sea. The ocean becomes both setting and metaphor: a liminal space where symbols float in and out of meaning, and where identity becomes fluid, ambient, and ungraspable. Like the sculptures, the film offers no fixed reading - only an unfolding visual meditation on the aesthetics of longing, presence, and disappearance in the digital age.

Bailey’s broader practice moves between two conceptual realms: Loobtopia, a hyper-curated space of surface, performance, and visual excess; and Ethereality, a posthuman imaginary of quiet dissolution. Both are grounded in her interest in how people express and archive themselves through technology - and in what lingers when language, memory, and image begin to break apart.

Despite its digital surface, her practice is deeply material and emotional, rooted in the same desire to hold onto something fleeting: a face, a landscape, a feeling, a line of text. In a time when so much of our world is filtered through screens, these works ask us to look again, more slowly - and to consider how memory is not just stored, but felt.

BIO: 

Ruby Bailey (b. 2000, South Africa) is a multimedia artist working between Cape Town and New York City. Her practice moves across sculpture, video, digital media, and installation. Drawing from personal memory, internet aesthetics, and symbolic visual language, she examines how longing, loneliness, and the sublime take shape in mediated space. 

Working through two conceptual frameworks - Loobtopia, a hyper-curated world of digital performance, and Ethereality, a dissolving posthuman sublime - Bailey’s work invites viewers to slow down, touch, rearrange, and reflect. Her recent exhibitions include Ethereality (Everard Read, Cape Town), ALTEREGOISM (London), Synthetics (Metalabel HQ, NYC), and Chiaroscuro (Carpenters Workshop, Dubai). She holds a BA (cum laude) from Camberwell College of Arts, London.