Long Pose
Alexander Gray Associates
November 7–December 20, 2025
New York
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 her pastel-colored tiles of canvas to build her figures within outlines of jade adhesive. 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.