For FOG Design+Art 2025, Night Gallery is delighted to present new work by Tomashi Jackson and Brie Ruais, two represented artists from our program. Both artists subvert craft traditions—ceramics for Ruais, collage for Jackson—as they create bold forms that unite elements of painting and sculpture. Cycles of life, death, and creative rebirth become major themes.
Ruais’s process begins when she places 130 pounds of commercial clay—the weight of her own body—on the ground. She kneels atop it and spreads the material into radial shapes that retain impressions of her knees and feet. She tears the structure into 12-20 pieces, then glazes and fires each. As water evaporates, the piece loses significant mass. Ruais’s resulting, wall-hung forms negotiate between delicacy and strength. They suggest the fragile relationship between humans and our environment.
In newer pieces, the artist references her own family. Petaling Within Mother (2024), which resembles a radiating flower, honors the artist’s late mother and alludes to the relationship between maternal inheritance and the natural world. Throughout other works, Ruais evokes a chrysalis and insect metamorphoses. In the face of loss, Ruais’s work argues for creative transformation.
In her multimedia paintings, Tomashi Jackson integrates an ashen paste made from burned Los Angeles palm leaves, a material that directly engages with the landscape and history of the city she grew up in. Her work reflects a process of transformation—both of the material itself and the act of creating—as she draws from Josef Albers's color theory to explore geometric experimentation and research. Jackson’s approach embodies the ritual of art-making as a means to navigate personal and collective grief, braiding together images of joy and trauma.
Both Ruais and Jackson use their respective mediums to mourn recent losses, reimagining art as a life-affirming ritual. Their works become sites for shared bereavement and renewal.
In addition to this presentation, Night Gallery will exhibit new paintings by Bay Area artist Sarah Blaustein, who mounted her solo exhibition Overture with us in September 2024. The artist uses domestic tools such as rags and house painters' brushes to make vibrant marks across wet canvas. Blaustein's use of water embodies fluidity, presence, and the constant ebb and flow of creation.
Together, these three artists offer a profound meditation on the impermanence of life and the enduring power of creation.