Ruth Becker
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Ruth Becker creates layered, dimensional artworks exploring how practice shapes perception. Her work blends material precision with conceptual clarity
MessageRuth Becker is a multidisciplinary artist whose dimensional, layered works function as both structure and lens — material explorations that engage distinct ways of knowing and seeing. Her current body of work, Suspensions, combines hand-painted plexiglass, laser-cut wood, and painted grounds to create sculptural wall pieces that shift with changing light and perspective.
Her work has been recognized with top honors at major juried art festivals, including Best in Show at the 2023 Bethesda Fine Arts Festival and First Place in Mixed Media at the Creative Crafts Council 34th Biennial. She was named a finalist for the FY2025 DC Art Bank Program and the 5th Biennial Maryland Regional Juried Exhibition, and was recently selected by the Washington Nationals as a featured artist for Jewish Heritage Day. An Artists & Scholars Project Grant recipient, Ruth is supported in part by funding from the Montgomery County Government and the Arts & Humanities Council of Montgomery County,
A DC native recently returned to the region, Ruth lives and works in Maryland after extended time in California and Israel. She holds degrees in rhetoric and law from UC Berkeley and Columbia Law School, and was a Fulbright Fellow in Tel Aviv. Her background in language and legal theory informs her commitment to clarity, structure, and conceptual depth.
Statement
Suspensions: Toward the Bright Unknown
As a multidisciplinary artist, my medium is my message. I create layered, dimensional artworks of cut paper, painted plywood, and acrylic that engage distinct ways of knowing and seeing. Each piece is both structure and lens: a material record of process and a space for perceptual inquiry.
My work is grounded in the principle that what we do shapes what we know. Phenomena are brought forth and disclosed by practices—and those practices, in turn, shape perception and experience. This link between making and meaning is central to my work, inviting both self-awareness in creation and participatory presence in contemplation. Each piece asks to be viewed from different angles, as both whole and in parts: a single image yielding to shifting fields of understanding.
Earlier works, comprised of cut and stacked layers of paper and plywood, explore creative unfolding and change over time. Like tree rings or geological strata, the works are artifacts of repetition and change, each layer a moment in a larger transformation. These pieces mirror the cinematic technique of deep focus, allowing viewers to see each component clearly while also stepping back and “zooming out” to perceive the broader arc of becoming.
In counterpoint, my current work, Suspensions, zooms in—shifting from the accumulation of time to its suspension. Where earlier works layered transformation through material sequence, these pieces hold a single moment still, softening focus to expand into presence. This open-ended, ongoing body of dimensional, wall-mounted artworks integrates subject and predicate, medium and message—each one a meditation on the process of its making. Composed of hand-painted, laser-cut plexiglass and wood, the suspended forms hover above painted or prepared grounds on stainless steel pins, creating layered relationships between figure and field, light and shadow, solidity and motion.
The initial works within this broader structure gesture toward light, inviting a softened gaze and subtle shift in focus—holding space for the luminous not-yet. The compositions abstract the experience of seeing points of light through a narrowed depth of field: peripheral glimpses made fully present and sculpturally articulate. Matte, translucent, and iridescent finishes shift with the light, creating a perceptual field that is both grounded and ephemeral. As viewers move, the work responds, offering not merely an image but an open-ended encounter with light, color, and presence—attuned, resonant, and awake to the radiant unknown.