Ground
An Exhibition Proposal Series show by Flora Ranis
on view
on view
July 10 – August 9, 2026
closing reception
Friday July 31, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Cambridge, MA – Gallery 263 is honored to present Ground, a solo exhibition that explores the roots of industry through sculpture. As artist Flora Ranis writes, “The steel that dots and scaffolds our lives begins in the earth’s crust, where it flourishes as warm, red rock … Though it is easy to consider steel as a separate entity from the natural world, metal, like most constructive materials, is intimately tied to the land and sea.”
Through examining the built environment, Ranis highlights the human labor at the heart of industrial production and the delicate nature of manufactured forms. In so doing, she connects steel to its origins and complicates the forces guiding urban imaginations.
Works featured in Ground – such as steel grates and century plants sculpted out of soil – investigate the tension between institutional, manufactured forms and the bodies they aim to regulate. Together, they instill an emotional charge to standardized materials like steel, copper, wire and wood.
“When welding, a ground clamp completes the electrical circuit required to produce an arc. It serves as an integral connector and liaison, directing the flow of thousands of degrees of heat to a single point,” Ranis writes in reflection of the exhibition’s namesake. “We may consider the physical ground on which we stand a similar point of contact.”
preview
Orion, steel, rust, pewter cast in the shape of a flipped border map, 2025
Man, oil on canvas, steel armature, heat, 2025
Talis, oil on canvas, steel armature, heat, 2025
About the artist
Flora Ranis is a multidisciplinary artist and storyteller from the Florida Everglades whose work explores the molten, hand-made qualities of our built environment. Rooted in new materialism and the speculative futures of disobedient swampland, her practice honors matter as an active force and wetlands as sites of porous, shifting infrastructure. In working intimately with soil, steel, and stone, Ranis presses her skin to the edge of urban environments, highlighting the human labor at the heart of industrial production and the delicate, molten nature of manufactured forms. Her works are rooted in carbon and crust, connecting steel to the iron ore from which it is birthed and connecting stone to the ancient marine organisms layered in its epidermis.
Flora recently received the NE Sculpture & Gallery Factory’s Emerging Artist Fellowship, the Broward County Cultural Division Artist Support Grant, the Penland School of Craft Winter Fellowship, the ARTS Southeast On View Residency, and the Boynes International Young Artist Award. Her work is currently on view at the Art Complex Museum and was recently accessioned into the permanent collection of Yale University’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration department.