Brooklyn Buzzy

Bright Spots is a collection of wood assemblages built from rescued scraps, painted fragments, and studio remnants. Each work gathers color, texture, and memory into small constellations of repair. As they come together, the pieces begin to take on a life of their own echoing, gestures of past use. The surfaces hum with improvisation and humor, turning imperfection into a kind of radiance. Bright Spots celebrates the alchemy of the discarded, revealing how light, play, and spirit can emerge from what’s been broken, transforming debris into creatures of resilience and wonder.

Willow Ruth (Buzzy), b. 1976, is a Brooklyn-based artist working with painting, sculpture, and assemblage. Her work began with painted lunch notes made for her youngest son on scraps of packaging. These small works were made quickly every morning while having her coffee and became a daily ritual. They are the foundation for everything that followed. Her assemblages carry that same instinctive directness into three dimensions. She sources materials from found scraps of wood off the streets of NYC, scavenged from her father's woodworking shop as well as her friends' studios. Buzzy intuitively assembles the pieces to create a map of what was and lets you figure out what will be from your own perspective. Her current ceramic works are hand-built from stoneware and porcelain and finished with raw, textured surfaces. They are intentionally awkward, sitting in an "ugly-cute" category. Buzzy combines humor with seriousness, creating decidedly weird creatures with exaggerated features. The clay to speak for itself, the glazes are there to highlight the physical form of the creatures. Adorning them with 24K gold gives them an opulence that allows them to be taken seriously. Her three children are her most important critics.