THIS IS THE HOVER STATE, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
LOW-POLY LULLABY {!}, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
THIS IS THE @BSENCE, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
ANGELS SINGING LA LA LA, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
LIGHTNING AND 6TRANCE, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
DIGITAL WIND, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
THE *HERE* THE *THIS*, 2024 Ed. 1/6 +1AP A3 HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG 34 x 46 cm
crude encryption_paper body, 2024 Ed. 1/3 +1AP DIGITALLY EMBOSSED ASCII PHOTOGRAPH PRINTED ON HAHNEMÜHLE PHOTO RAG ULTRA SMOOTH 120.5 x 110.5 cm
CITY, 2024 POWDER COATED STEEL FRAME AND LAZERCUT DRAWINGS, PRINTED VINYL, MAGNETS, CHAINS, MEDICAL TUBES AND AEROPLANE PART 136.5 x 56.5 x 50 cm
ISLAND, 2024 POWDER COATED STEEL FRAME AND LAZERCUT DRAWINGS, PRINTED VINYL, MAGNETS, CHAINS AND MEDICAL TUBES 118 x 50 x 50 cm
GARDEN, 2024 POWDER COATED STEEL FRAME AND LAZERCUT DRAWINGS, PRINTED VINYL, MAGNETS, CHAINS AND MEDICAL TUBES 118 x 50 x 50 cm
YOU ARE AN AIR PRINCESS {!}, 2024 PURE WHITE POWDER COATED LASER-CUT STEEL AND PRINTED MAGNETIC UV VINYL 41.5 x 35 cm
_DEAD ZONE_, 2024 PURE WHITE POWDER COATED LASER-CUT STEEL AND PRINTED MAGNETIC UV VINYL 59 x 40 cm
EVERYWHEREANDTHENDISSOLVE, 2024 PURE WHITE POWDER COATED LASER-CUT STEEL AND PRINTED MAGNETIC UV VINYL 73.5 x 28 cm
HOVER STATE, 2024 PURE WHITE POWDER COATED LASER-CUT STEEL AND PRINTED MAGNETIC UV VINYL 30 x 30 cm
_HERE_ IS THE GREENER GRASS, 2024 PURE WHITE POWDER COATED LASER-CUT STEEL AND PRINTED MAGNETIC UV VINYL 23 x 40 cm
TYPE OR PASTE YOUR CONTENT HERE , 2024 PURE WHITE POWDER COATED LASER-CUT STEEL AND PRINTED MAGNETIC UV VINYL 36 x 40 cm
PRIORI ACUTE OT SANS, Ed. 1/6 +1AP DIASEC 30 x 120 cm
STONE TOOL *SOLID AIR*, 2024 /8 +1AP 3D SCANNED ACHEULEAN HANDAXE, SCALED TO 60CM, CAST IN CLEAR RESIN WITH MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS SUSPENDED WITHIN 17 x 60 x 34 cm
crude encryption_metal body, 2024 Ed. 1/3 +1AP LASERCUT SHEET OF ANODISED ALUMINIUM, MOUNTED ON A SECOND SHEET OF MIRROR-LIKE STAINLESS STEEL 140 x 120 cm
US, 2024 MIRROR COLLAGE 140 x 120 cm
STONE TOOL *SOLID AIR*, 2024 /8 +1AP 3D SCANNED ACHEULEAN HANDAXE, SCALED TO 60CM, CAST IN CLEAR RESIN WITH MISCELLANEOUS ELECTRONIC COMPONENTS SUSPENDED WITHIN 17 x 60 x 34 cm
Ruby Bailey’s Ethereality explores the intersections of technology, identity and speculative futures through sculpture, analogue interactive artworks, painterly digital landscapes and encrypted nude selfies, with ideas moving between video, paper, magnet, steel and acrylic. The exhibition imagines a world where the boundaries between the physical and digital blur, presenting tools, environments, and symbols that challenge traditional notions of materiality and representation.
Resin casts of an Acheulean stone tool, enlarged and embedded with fragments of miscellaneous computer and machine components, suggest tools crafted by a posthuman species from a material Ruby imagines as *solid air*. These works blend past and future, reflecting the evolving relationship between beings, technology, and their environments. They are, in a sense, already an interspecies collaboration, as the original hand axe was crafted by Homo erectus approximately 500,000 years ago.
Ruby’s "interactive paintings" consist of laser-cut steel panels powder-coated in white. These panels, featuring cut-out symbols and text, act as backdrops for rearrangeable vinyl magnets printed with digital collages of images, drawings, secrets and screenshots. This design creates a flexible, ever-changeable analogue interface. Ruby’s works mimic digital aesthetics, embracing a techno-fetishistic approach to analogue media while highlighting the noncommittal tendencies inspired by internet culture’s rapid pace.
“Encrypted” works abstract Ruby’s nude selfie into sequences of ASCII text, presented as both a fine paper print and a laser-cut aluminium panel. These pieces censor a crudely personal image by converting it into a symbolic language, exploring the tension between visibility, privacy and self-representation in a digitally mediated world. The original nude is legible, despite it being made up of letters and numbers. We are post-privacy.
Sculptural pieces, finished in reflective chrome, incorporate airplane parts, chains and symbolic cutouts. Their mirror-like surfaces create a disorienting sense of infinity, amplifying their physical presence while suggesting multiple entry points – expanding beyond the singular, flat entryway of a screen, even as they unmistakably reference it. Symbolic cutouts, including grass, airplane shapes, cursors and glyphs, are interwoven again with the silhouette of Ruby’s own selfie. Together, the structures form a phantom city.
An acrylic print features ID-photo-sized, wide-angle portraits of revellers from Ruby’s nights out, arranged to spell the phrase ‘r u a robot?’. Referencing the uncanny valley of sterile CAPTCHA tests, this work also serves as a personal archive of fleeting social moments. Hidden among the human faces are artificial ones, flipping CAPTCHA’s role: the viewer is to determine the real human from the artificial.
The video work *Endlessity* layers AI-generated imagery, secret club footage and abstract visuals to examine the interplay between presence and absence. Digital landscapes echo through the film, and also feature as paper prints, evoking speculative, dreamlike environments populated by Ruby’s Sims-inspired avatar, L00bi. These compositions blend digital aesthetics with a sense of calm and melancholy, suggesting a fragmented and surreal world shaped by data and memory.
In Ethereality, Ruby’s interconnected works invite viewers to reflect on how technology reshapes identity, tools, and environments. The exhibition presents a speculative vision of continuity, transformation, and the blurred boundaries of existence.
RUBY BAILEY
(b. 2000, Johannesburg, South Africa)
Ruby Bailey is a South African multimedia artist whose work explores the intersections of technology, identity, and speculative futures. Engaging with contemporary technofetishism and digital aesthetics, she investigates themes of transformation, interconnectedness, and the hidden systems that shape cyber and rave culture. Through film, digital media, and installation, Ruby creates immersive landscapes that merge AI-generated visuals, hidden camera footage, and speculative collages, revealing spaces where digital and physical worlds converge.
Her videos Loobtopia and *Endlessity*, both released on Metalabel, interrogate the boundaries of reality, applying AI to lived experience. Recently completing a residency at NIROX Sculpture Park, Bailey developed the works for her Ethereality 2025. Now a resident with Foreign Objekt, a posthuman artist network, she continues to explore the intersections of arts, technology, and philosophy.