Rough Ruby Arts Collective Rough Ruby Arts Collective

Artists Creating to Make a Difference

  • Home
  • Artists
  • What We Do
  • ARTISTS IN ACTION
  • Membership
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • Artists
  • What We Do
  • ARTISTS IN ACTION
  • Membership
  • Contact Us

Current  Full  Artist  Members

Hellen Dunn . Steffany Suze Boucher . Cathleen Meadows

Hannah Star Rogers . Laura BenAmots . Ceil Horowitz 

Current Guest Artist Member: Marsha Gold Gayer

 Hellen Dunn         Sculptor,Installation Artist,Conceptual Video Artist
https://www.helleneberhardie.com/blog
Born in rural England, Hellen considers London her home. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art, a member of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. Recipient of a bursary from the Arts Council of Great Britain for her traveling installation Crystal Lotuses, she brought the exhibit to the UCCS Gallery of Contemporary Art in 2004 which led to a yearlong residency at University of Colorado's Heller Center.
Her work spans the classical to the purely conceptual, lyrical to discordant. Deeply personal, it reaches for the universal as she documents her own journey and strives to reflect upon womanhood and societal connections. 
Her most recent projects are titled "Interventionist Landscapes" exploring stillness and time. 
 Steffany Suze Boucher                 Spatial Transformation Artist

Steffany received her MFA in Sculpture from Parsons School of Design in New York City. 


Her work connects to the curiosities, abnormalities and anomalies in living beings affected by bio-engineering, industry, new technologies, changing environment and evolution. 


She has shown her work throughout Illinois,  Colorado, Brooklyn and New York City including collaborative, individual and invitational exhibits.


In addition, Steffany is a dedicated educator. Her teaching experience includes Pikes Peak Community College and Bemis School of Art, Colorado Springs; Parsons School of Design, NYC. She has taught in the subject areas of Art History & Appreciation, Foundation and Design: Studio Coursework (including: Three-Dimensional Design; Introductory: Architecture, Communication Design, Fine Art, Fashion, Illustration, Product Design; Design Theory; Design Laboratory; Drawing and Sculpture) and College Preparatory coursework. 


She is currently undergoing training to become certified in sound therapy – sound frequency systems. 

Laura BenAmots                  Painter & Installation Artist 
 http://www.benamotsart.com http://www.battleportraits.com

New York born painter, Laura BenAmots, spent her formative years abroad. She studied painting at the historic Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, earned her BFA from the Tyler College of Art & Design at Temple University and has an MFA with a split emphasis in Book Arts, Printmaking and Painting from the Philadelphia University of the Arts. 


Career highlights include being awarded a 3-month Artist Studio Residency at the Machine Shop 2017-18, being featured artist in the online publication Collateral in 2017 and selection for the International Contemporary Artist Exhibition 2014 in Assisi, Italy. Other artist honors include selection for The Woven Tale Press Summer 2016 and 2012 recognition as Visual Artist of the Year for the Pikes Peak Region in Colorado. 


Largely driven by the codependent tensions between strength and vulnerability, belonging and isolation, her paintings, drawings and installation projects have made it possible for her to approach the varied dimensions of human frailty.  


Two books have been published about her work: BATTLE PORTRAITS Wounded Lions Wounded Lambs (published and distributed by the Art Book Project battleportraits.com) and Eros On Canvas: the erotic paintings of Laura BenAmots (co-published by Last Gasp Press, San Francisco CA and Smokemuse Press CO). 
Cathleen Meadows           Installation Conceptual Artist

As a conceptual artist I work with a wide variety of materials focusing on both personal and social issues. “A Lady’s Ode to Trump” is in reference to his atrocious disrespect for women. Themes of gun violence and abuse of women permeate my work. I’m currently working on a series of embroidered linen napkins related to school shootings with the hope of countering the seemingly instantaneous cultural amnesia that follows these atrocities. 

Career Exhibit Highlights: 2018 “Artists in Action”; Juried Exhibit.2017 “Gun Shy” One-Person Exhibit & Artisst in Residence, Machine Shop; 2015 “Poetic Images-Constructing Meaning” 3-Woman Show Manitou Arts Center CO. 1997; “Composing A Life” Two-Person, One West Art Center, Fort Collins  CO; 1995 “Inner Beauty Outer Sight” installation UMC Art Gallery, University of Colorado Boulder; 1993 “No Town An Island” Invitational Exhibit. Fuel Gallery, Seattle WA; 1992 “Chairs, Chairs, Chairs” Center for the Visual Art, Metropolitan State College, Denver CO; 10-year Traveling Exhibit. 1991 Rocky Mountain Women's Institute, 1-year Artist Residency, Denver CO; 1990 “Dolls for the 21st Century” Juried Exhibit, Springfield Museum, Springfield OR; 1987 “Scarecrow” Emmanuel Gallery, Denver CO.

 Hannah Star Rogers              Poet - Art & Science Researcher   

I was taught this by the Waves


Time is a thing both large and small


and if you are growing in it, like water

you are healing from the change


and turning back toward what you 


were newly native to some 

other shape but always pooling


toward the beginning yourself.


I don’t think you will want to understand


The climate that we are facing has no face

That is it has no direction to turn toward


No way to know what way the wind blows

The torrent of the heat wind or bridle


Of the dove’s migration arcs into a heaven

Whose end cannot be imagined even by the mind.


Enter the water

But don’t stray as far as the swamp wrecks
Bottle green ducks slain on pilings

Mud dusted and bricking the dock rope
The reed clashing and a cast of the wind

Speckling the frame of the eyes with bent lashes
The scene hurtles toward a reckoning with

the vengeance of one last blackberry winter.
Afterwards you will not be as sure of May

It seems the the warming could always turn back
To the sea. If you are cold, hold my hand.

1.

Through tulip tree’s yet fragrant wood the tide

at night exposed its tender meat for snails.

The pods yet dangle as a weeping chime

as through them moves the ochre mangrove crab.

2. 

The open shell its tongue unfolds in tide

its open whirl the sun pulls back and dries

The ocean curls around the pressing oars

overhead cadence and the foam unfurls.

3.

My wax now fused to freshly molusced sands,

peeled back the shell, poured in the boiling sea,

and from blue flesh yet she a gleaming white.

While ocean touched her brief array she glowed

Yet when I packed her in wool cloth she grayed.

If time should take me back to those late waves,

I would return to that great beach the pearl. 

4.

Questions of Authenticity

Inside, my mother leans over a boiling pot of molluscs: every

shade of orange fighting conch and every size of lacy murex

from juvenile to several with mature purple lips. Beautiful 

shell colors, enough to kill the animals inside, not so much to transform their lacquer to dull gray, or worse, crack the 

bivalve hinges.



https://hannahstarrogerspoetry.wordpress.com

Hannah Star Rogers is a poet, curator and art-science scholar. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. Her poems and reviews have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tupelo Quarterly, The Carolina Quarterly,  and The Southern Women’s Review. Her flash fiction has been honored by Nat. Brut and Glimmer Train. She has received the Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship. She has held artist residencies at the Djerassi, ArtHub, Tofte Lake Center, Catswalk, the Arctic Circle in Finland, and National Park Service writing residencies in both Acadia, Maine and the Everglades, FL. Her scholarly publications on art and science have appeared in Leonardo, Configurations, and Photomediations.

As a curator, her installation Making Science Visible: The Photography of Berenice Abbott, received an exhibits prize from the British Society for the History of Science and resulted in an invited lecture at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. She is past Director of Research and Collaboration and Guest Bioart Curator for Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future. In 2017, she curated the exhibition, Art's Work in the Age of Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures, hosted at the Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh and sponsored by the NC Science Festival. She has served as a judge for Genspace’s Biodesign Challenge, a student competition of art, design, and biology projects held at the MoMA. She received her MFA in poetry from Columbia University and her Ph.D. at Cornell University on the intersection of art and science. 
 Ceil Horowitz                Street Painter & People's Painter
painting in NY subway

When asked what she wanted to be at age 3, she said "artist." Ceil Horowitz is inspired by and driven to capture, depict and exalt the life of the "little guy", counting herself among them.Her hope is to inspire dialogue and discovery through her paintings. Most recently she traveled on a grant to the Druze village of Yarka in Israel's Carmel Mountains to draw the elders. Since 2012 she has spent her winters painting "Subway Musicians" in the NYC subway system. In addition, Ceil has just completed traveling to Colorado's first 100 breweries where  she has created folk inspired on location "portraits" of the breweries. 

Ceil's  training includes a degree from Hunter College in NY, studies at the Kansas City Institute of Art and an apprenticeship with New York painter Linda Scott. Her life's journey includes being born, with her twin, in LA during her parents cross country adventure, farming and construction in Alaska, parenting in Israel and Chicago, fabricating and designing high end jewelry in NY, painting and farming in Colorado. 
Marsha Gold Gayer
Marsha is a New York based artist and a Cooper Union graduate. She calls herself a "drawer" and has centered her work on evocative figurative imagery that is simultaneously tender, sexy, vulnerable, strong and disturbing. 
Marsha has exhibited nationwide. The Rough Ruby Arts Collective is very pleased to feature her as our current Visiting Artist Member.
Her work is engaged in explorations of gender identity and intimacy. 
http://marshagoldgayer.com