ruby onyinyechi amanze: SWIMMING POOL MAGAZINE DANCE [musings in Mexico City]

ruby onyinyechi amanze composes drawings that challenge the two-dimensional boundaries of paper. Her forms float on the surface, freed from gravity, time, and space. In her universe, seven recurring motifs appear—motorcycles, architecture, "ada" appearing as a swimmer or dancer who intimately dialogs with "audre" the leopard, the paper itself, birds, and pools—that combine in in infinite variations. More than telling stories, these compositions seek to produce sensations and moods.

In this exhibition, titled SWIMMING POOL  MAGAZINE  DANCE [musings in Mexico City], the artist transforms the gallery into an introspective laboratory to showcase materials, questions, and experiments. If on paper her drawings challenge two-dimensionality, here amanze explores the spatial dimensions of the white cube in an open process that allows us a glimpse into the essence of her practice.

SWIMMING POOL is an in-situ installation that introduces a fragment of a swimming pool into the interior of the room, as a prototype for a public space installation, and it is also interpreted into four wall sculptures throughout the exhibition. The most recent addition [since 2025] to the working vocabulary of seven elements, swimming pools cross-expanded her investigations of architecture and the overarching subject of space. This object, inseparable from the imagery of the modern house and its ethos of transparency and continuity between interior and exterior, became in the 20th century a symbol of suburban lifestyle and consumption, laden with social exclusions. In Los Angeles, it even became an urban typology, crystallized in David Hockney's painting as the esthetics of modern desire. amanze enjoys the open ended, yet also, clear societal associations to swimming pools. Consistent with her drawing practice, there is adequate room for the viewer to bring their own interpretations to the work. These experiments with tiles are an evolution of the public installation in the Borough Hall metro station in New York City, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design and to be unveiled at the end of 2025.

MAGAZINE refers to the editorial project that accompanies the exhibition. With a longstanding relationship to paper, as both plane and object, amanze returns to an early practice and interest in bookmaking. This practice allows for a different process of creating imagery, guided by form, design and poetry.  The result materializes in a limited-edition publication that retained the emphasis of paper as more than a substrate and allows for a self-actualized archive of a thirteen-year practice. The publication is framed in a space of the gallery, alongside displayed sketches, collages, and books, revealing the artist's creative process. Architecture also occupies a central place: using synthetic strokes, plans, and references from architecture publications, amanze deconstructs, juxtaposes, and reorganizes images to create new compositions.

Finally, DANCE manifests both as a specific performative gesture within the exhibition and as a force that runs through the project as a whole. Just as "ada," the swimmer-dancer, traverses amanze's drawings in a continuous movement, the artist invites the audience to navigate the gallery in a choreographic key, guided by curiosity and process. DANCE is also collaboration: amanze created the “one-off" dance laboratory SIN RED (No Net) and together with dancer Tania Solomonoff, choreographed the performative piece silence is not the end that will be activated in the gallery on September 27, 2025.