An exchange.
How do you tell the story of a friendship? How do you trace the roots of one of the most significant cross-disciplinary unions in fashion today? Artist Sterling Ruby and fashion designer Raf Simons did just that when they sat on stage with curator Jessica Morgan at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Offering complimentary perspectives on a bond that has matured over the span of a decade, and a body of work that transcends boundaries, Ruby and Simons spoke with mutual respect, trust, and a deep investment in the future. This is a story, and an exchange, that is beyond collaboration.
This book is part of “The Incidents” series, based on events that occurred at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design between 1936 and tomorrow.
The multitude of media and techniques used by Sterling Ruby (born 1972 in Bitburg, Germany, lives and works in Los Angeles) in his work—ranging from sculpture to collage, installation to painting, ceramics to video and printing—reflects the issues he tackles: the conflict between individual impulses and mechanisms of social control, the coercive function of architectonic space, art as the domain of irrationality, the sphere of dysfunctional behavior, Minimalism and Art Brut, Graffiti art, urban violence, desire, and pleasure.
His works combine memory of the past with attention to contemporary urban and popular phenomena. It is an art of expression and accumulation, of the overproduction of information and of the delirium of the senses, of neurosis and paranoia, and where the gigantism of the shapes and their proliferation appear like a corrupt manifestation of desire, consumption, anxiety, and the need for control that characterizes contemporary occidental culture.
See also
Kaleidoscope #27 – Sterling Ruby Takeover.
