Perhaps it sounds prosaic to observe that art history forms the building blocks of contemporary art. But, in the work of artist Ruby Sky Stiler, that truism takes a rather literal shape in a series of figurative sculptures that treat the remains of classical art like so much debris, waiting to be sifted through and cobbled together into new forms.
In a group of three sculptures on view at the Works, Stiler conjoins slabs of what appear to be concrete (but is, in fact, a modern, lightweight material) into human forms, in which each slab depicts a different portion of the body in a pick-and-mix amalgamation of incongruous classical styles. In one, the figure's torso is halved between a nude woman, whose form is redolent of the goddess in Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus," and the flowing folds of a toga, presumably inspired by a Greek statue. As the earmarks of Renaissance art and antiquity collide within the spatial logic of her work, Stiler affects a kind of historical flattening, in which contradictory styles.
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