Double Candle, 2018

Sterling Ruby’s prolific and inventive practice spans painting, photography, textiles, video, ceramics, sculpture, and fashion design. He is especially well known for his provocative approach to materials; before making this work, he created free-standing, fiberfill-stuffed sculptures of candles wrapped in fabric, most notably a patchwork of American flag pattern. In Double Candle, Ruby turns to bronze, one of sculpture’s most immovable and weighty materials, to capture and crystallize the ephemeral presence of flickering light. The twinned, towering objects hold a singular place in the twenty-first-century American psyche, and the work marries its formal concerns with a political edge. If a monument can be understood as an expression of power in public space, and a memorial as an expression of grief, Double Candle stands as a synthesis of the two: resolute and melancholy, it calls to national memory, unity, and spirit.

Washington, District of Columbia · United States