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Who Art You · 8:25

Daniel Gordon & Ruby Sky Stiler Take Baby Steps

Daniel Gordon · Ruby Sky Stiler

What’s the art of balancing work and family? From their home in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, married artists Daniel Gordon and Ruby Sky Stiler candidly discuss the complex professional and personal dynamics of bringing a baby into their already busy lives. Gordon’s and Stiler’s studios are a study in contrasts. Gordon’s studio in DUMBO is overflowing with color and materials, the floor strewn with paper scraps from which he creates elaborate still lifes to photograph. Stiler’s studio in Gownaus is more orderly, her work table a puzzle of Styrofoam shards from which she constructs sculptures and casts elegant bas-reliefs referencing antiquity. Gordon and Stiler met in graduate school and, like many hard-working professionals in their thirties, the decision to have a baby was a difficult leap into the unknown.

For Stiler, the transition from taking care of baby Gus to working in the studio was trying: feelings of satisfaction at going back to work hit up against feelings of guilt at not being at home with her newborn. For Gordon, life after the baby meant learning how to maximize his studio time within a set 9 to 5 schedule, while home became an unexpected release from the burdens of art. “Now having Gus, it’s such a pleasure and a relief to have some other thing that’s very important that pulls you away from all that stuff and pulls you away from your head,” says Gordon. “You can’t obsess and take care of Gus. You have to obsess about Gus, and then you can obsess about the other stuff.”

More information and creditsFeaturing work by Gordon included in the exhibition Screen Selections and Still Lifes (2014) at Wallspace, and work by Stiler included in the exhibition Circumstance (2015) at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.

Featured artists

Daniel Gordon Ruby Sky Stiler

About the artists

Daniel Gordon was born in 1980 in Boston, Massachusetts, was raised in San Francisco, California, and lives and works in New York. Gordon creates works that dissolve distinctions between collage, photography, and sculpture. His practice involves culling images from the Internet, digitally altering them, and using them to construct tableaus, which he then photographs. His ability to integrate digital and analog images creates a joyful disorientation in which fiction and truth are indistinguishable from each other.

Ruby Sky Stiler was born in 1979 in Portland, Maine, and lives and works in New York City. Her monochromatic sculptures and reliefs draw upon a wide range of cultural references, evoking the forms of classical antiquities and the fractured aesthetic of Cubist painting and collage.

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