About the Artist
Ruzo Logic
There's a version of this story that starts with casinos — with two decades spent building the elaborate sets and attractions that make the Las Vegas Strip feel like nowhere else on earth. And there's another version that starts with a heart attack, a hundred-hour workweek finally catching up, and a very simple, very stubborn question: what would it look like to build art the same way, instead? Working under the name Ruzo Logic, he first answered that question by taking painting out of the gallery and into the street — founding Guerrilla Kages, a live, public painting format, and later District Artz, the Las Vegas nonprofit he still co-leads with Kim Johnson. Their work has funded youth mural programs, staffed community art markets, and put brushes in the hands of anyone willing to pick one up. But the material he kept coming back to, underneath all of it, was wood. Since 2023, that instinct has become his primary practice. He now spends most of his studio time carving raw logs and salvaged lumber into large abstract sculptures — forms that echo bone, spine, and driftwood, shaped as much by what the wood already wants to be as by what he asks of it. A parallel series takes the opposite approach: hundreds of small, hand-cut wood blocks assembled piece by piece into mosaic-clad figures, built up rather than carved away. It's the same builder's hands, pointed at something more personal than a public canvas — even as he keeps showing that work exactly where he's always shown it: at the community markets and festivals he helped build a home for.
“For nearly two decades, Ruzo Logic built things for other people's visions — casinos, attractions, live public paintings that whole crowds could add a brushstroke to. Since 2023, his own hands have turned toward something rawer: reclaimed logs and salvaged lumber, carved and pieced into abstract, bone-like forms that look like they grew that way. His work still shows up where the public can find it — Las Vegas art markets, community festivals, the arts district he helped build — but now the material talks back before he does.”
The Process
Inside the Studio
The Painting Process
From Raw Log to Finished Form Ruzo Logic's studio isn't one fixed room — it's a working yard, part covered shop and part open-air lot, stacked with full tree trunks, salvaged lumber, and reclaimed pallet wood waiting for their next life. Hand tools share bench space with angle grinders, rotary carving tools, and a small library of chisels and mallets — the same instinct for sourcing, building, and problem-solving he carried over from years as a design fabricator. A piece usually starts with the log itself. Rather than sketching a final form and forcing the wood to match it, he works with what's already there — a curve in the grain, a knot, a hollow — roughing out the shape before switching to hand chisels and rotary tools for the fine detail: smoothing a joint, hollowing an opening, texturing a surface until it reads as bone, spine, or something else entirely that doesn't have a name yet. It's slow, physical work, often done outdoors in the Las Vegas heat, piece by piece, over weeks. A second, very different practice runs in parallel: taking hundreds of small, hand-cut blocks of reclaimed wood and building them up, one at a time, into mosaic-clad figures — the opposite instinct from carving, addition instead of subtraction, but rooted in the same patience. Whichever direction a piece takes, it eventually makes its way out of the workshop and into public view — at Las Vegas art markets, festival booths, and community events, the same spaces he's spent over a decade helping build for other artists.
