Violet Ruby (b. 2004) Based in Brooklyn, NY

About:

Violet Ruby (she/her) is a visual artist born in Los Angeles, California. She is currently based in New York City while pursuing her BFA in Fine Arts at the Parsons School of Design with a minor in Gender Studies and Queer Theory.

Statement:

Through installation, sculpture, collage, and video, my work explores the tension between performance and intimacy, questioning how identity is shaped in private and performed in public.

I ask:

Who are we when no one is watching?

Who do we become when we allow ourselves to be seen?

My practice sits within contradictions: routine, self-surveillance, and the body performing for itself and for others, constantly negotiating control and submission. I’m interested in how vulnerability can exist without spectacle, and how intimacy might be redefined outside heteronormative expectations.

Working with industrial and domestic materials, I transform forms often coded as utilitarian or hostile into sites of confession, desire, and queer embodiment. I question what makes material feel sensual or resistant, inviting or abrasive, and how craft and construction can be used to queer material itself.

I resist refinement, favoring exposed structures, stretched forms, and unresolved surfaces. I use repetition and refusal, allowing work to remain open, where tension is held rather than resolved.

Through reworking and destabilizing material, making becomes an act of self-definition—asserting bodily and sexual autonomy against systems that attempt to contain it.

Contact:

violetcookieruby@gmail.com