Tangible/Nothing

Ruby City presents Tangible/Nothing, a new installation of its permanent collection galleries, September 8, 2022—July 30, 2023. The exhibition features approximately 50 works by national and international artists as well as those with San Antonio and Texas ties, including recent acquisitions on view for the first time. Tangible/Nothing explores how the invisible or the seemingly mundane can reveal great meaning. Some works represent apparent voids, vestiges of what’s missing or subjects not pictured—a pair of arms bereft of a body, a woman represented only by her purse or Miss America seen only as a floating crown. Other works represent or incorporate everyday objects that stand in for big ideas, such as empty paint cans representing a white, heroic vision of America’s history or a bright pink stove calling out the pervasiveness of traditional gender roles.

Tangible/Nothing speaks to two different artistic approaches used by many artists today,” said Elyse A. Gonzales, director of Ruby City. “The first is the removal or purposeful avoidance of selected objects, while the other makes use of commonplace things, sometimes even representing them. Tangible/Nothing demonstrates how artists have used these methods to great effect to address loss, identity, gender, history, environmental concerns—or to question the very nature of art. It was fascinating to see how these alternative ideas of ubiquity and absence factored into many works in the collection considering they have shaped so much of my thinking about our late founder Linda Pace and her legacy, here and beyond.” 

San Antonio artists represented include Nate Cassie, Jim Mendiola, Katie Pell, Chuck Ramirez and Juan Miguel Ramos. The exhibition also includes works by David Cabrera, Alejandro Diaz (both born in San Antonio, based in New York), Rick Lowe (Houston), Dario Robleto (Houston) and Adam Schreiber (San Marcos), as well as works by David Avalos, Nathan Carter, Willie Cole, Dorothy Cross, Milagros de la Torre, Thomas Demand, Willie Doherty, Sam Durant, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, Teresita Fernández, Michel François, Isa Genzken, Mona Hatoum, Sir Isaac Julian OBE, Nina Katchadourian, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Daniel Joseph Martinez, Adam McEwen, Yasumasa Morimura, Michael O’Malley, Gabriel Orozco, Cornelia Parker, Ruben Ortiz-Torres and Jim Mendiola, Paul Pfeiffer, Doris Salcedo, and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Curated by Gonzales, the exhibition was inspired in part by Linda Pace, the founder of the Linda Pace Foundation and a lifelong supporter of artists. Though deceased in 2007, Pace and her legacy still deeply resonate throughout the Ruby City campus, its mission and the art community as a whole. The exhibition’s themes also reflect the social isolation caused by caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Tangible/Nothing taps into our collective experience of absence and presence over the past two years when the physical separation from family and friends necessitated finding all manner of ways to connect with them in absentia—with many experiencing permanent loss,” said Gonzales.

Serving as the connective tissue of the exhibition are a series of works by artists, many of whom were friends, that intimately portray or memorialize Pace, even if she is not pictured. For example, Chuck Ramirez photographed Pace’s purse in Purse Portraits: Louis (Linda), 2005. Ramirez’s series of purses, seen from above with the contents exposed, represent the owners, since purses—and the objects carried within—are a most personal possession and constant companion of many women. Another example is BookPace (2002), a series of photographs of the book spines in Pace’s home library by Nina Katchadourian, on loan from the artist. Selected and arranged by the artist, the book titles become spontaneous sentences, poems that reveal Pace and her passions, known and unknown.