"For my work I’ve created a concept called fantastic functionalism. This concept involves creating an alternative reality filled with objects and environments which are imbued with extreme idealism and hope. I look at everyday problems on a emotional, physical and social level and imagine new possibilities and solutions for them. I think of my work as the sketches or plans of a mad and naïve inventor creating fantastical machines, passageways, bus stops, transportation devices and shelter from a playground of transformed shapes and bright colors that stems from the ordinary."
Organic machinery, viral landscapes, mutated transportation devices and cyclical systems, this is the world we could inhabit. Steeped in naïve ideals of a utopian designer or a mad inventor Ruey's current work involves depictions of fantastical landscapes or spaces composed of organic shapes and structures that are architecturally influenced. In transforming shapes and structures that already exist she creates environments and objects that are seemingly familiar, on the verge of tangibility yet slipping past one's grasp. These landscapes involve the potential for movement, new structures, playful relationships and elements of the everyday.
Ruey's work is in private collections as well as two public collections include some of her work, Ernst & Young and The Wonderful Fund. Her work has been in group and solo exhibitions in New York, England, Morocco, Greece, Italy, Ireland and Taiwan. Her work is published in The Large Format in Contemporary Engraving 2004, edited by Silvia Ferrari and Zink Magazine's 2009 Summer Issue. This past year she has participated in The Bronx Museum's AIM program and received a fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. |