The Brooklyn Rail

Joined to the wall in the corners of the gallery, three bas-relief figures, monumental in scale, hold up the horizontal lines denoting floor and ceiling, earth and sky, that encircle the room. In Long Pose (2025), the titular work of Ruby Sky Stiler’s exhibition at Alexander Gray Associates, these caryatids are tasked—as caryatids have been since ancient times—with the burden of supporting architectural elements with resilience and grace. “Long pose” is a term borrowed from life drawing classes in which a model sustains a position for a prolonged period of time. Stiler’s reference to the caryatid motif suggests postures extending into days, years, and centuries of bearing the world. Fabricated from thin bands of wood painted an earthy red, the mural runs along walls and over doorways, a linear framework that presents more as a line drawing than a sculptural installation, its style hovering within the intersection of abstraction and figuration. There is an overall lightness at play that upends the idea of being doomed to a weight-bearing existence; one of the caryatids ignores the roof and instead raises the floor in an act that pulls the rug out from under any long-standing expectations.

Seven of Stiler’s recent paintings hang within the parallel contours of Long Pose. For these, the artist applies acrylic paint to sections of canvas in a muted range of cool colors—blues, purples, greens and pinks—before transferring pencil drawings, her children’s artwork, and found illustrations onto their surface. The swaths of canvas are then cut into tiny geometric shapes and pieced together in figurative mosaics that evoke the intimacies of parenting, artmaking, and community. With very little economy, Stiler’s images suggest classical nudes while maintaining a tender regard for the everyday.

In Artist With Bather (2025), a woman stands knee-deep in a wave of water, her hand reaching over her shoulder, perhaps to splash the back of her neck. In the foreground, another woman—presumably Stiler—sits on one knee, holding a palate of deeply saturated colors before her. She gestures towards her subject with a paintbrush, inviting the viewer to join in her process of looking. Stiler uses adhesive to join pastel-colored tiles of canvas and assemble her figures. Set against a background of cooler, darker colors, the figures take on an illusion of three-dimensionality that shatters into the fragments from which they are made upon close inspection.

Large Blue Mother (2025) shows a woman reclining with legs outstretched, a small child nestled against her. A slightly older child with a remote expression perches behind them. Minimal and abstract, the composition captures the nuance of mothering two children and trying to ensure that both feel equally loved. Mother holding Child (2025) recalls countless images of the Madonna, but the puff of a blanket wrapped around a baby alongside the mother’s drooping breast deftly evokes the unwavering attention a tiny being requires. While staying within the stylistic confines the artist sets for herself, Stiler still draws out the mother’s exhausted countenance. The curved line that horizontally divides Father holding Child (2025) becomes the shoulder of a man cradling an infant in an austere arrangement that balances the universal with the personal. The man’s face is turned in profile to the child, his mouth hidden behind the baby’s small head. Only the eyes are visible as its little head peeks above the father’s shoulder in a work that decentralizes the primacy of the maternal bond, making way for a more inclusive consideration of love and nurturance.

Circling around Stiler’s work at a polite distance offers plenty to chew on—her rethinking of how paintings are made, her interrogations of perception and the geometries of space. But step very close, and her fragments of printed canvas reveal a quieter, more direct record of her practice: a quick sketch, the doodling of a simple pattern, a child drawing people in their mother’s studio. Looking closely at Mother holding Child, I spy what I can only describe as a really good chicken, drawn with a child’s hand. Flowers and leaves, letters and grids echo the pleasure of pressing pencil to paper. The artist’s juxtapositions of moments in the studio, cut up and reassembled into new, larger pictures, calls to mind the practices of Betye Saar or Alice Neel: women who made art within the home, their children next to them as they worked. Moving from the monumentality of Long Pose to the intimacy of the small pieces of canvas, Stiler’s conjuring of art historical timelines cedes to these snapshots of the everyday.