Tammie Rubin
Four days, Every Single Day is a project of portable tokens emblematic of a heightened fear based “us versus them” mentality dominating political, social, and cultural life. These narratives embolden individualism while harnessing groupthink that isolates and flattens interpersonal and societal relations. Conspiracy theories, contrived plots, and outrages are tools that stoke fear and impart a survivalist mentality. Depicting scenes of physical exchanges, social ambiguity, and psychological tension, porcelain groupings are housed within hinged survival tins. Cones are a repeated form in Rubin’s sculptures. The form suggests ways of channeling, transmitting, or filtering, and has many associations including funnels, dunce cap, caution cones, snow cone cups, hennins, stupas, and church steeples. The cone references hoods worn by groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Catholic brotherhood of the Nazarenes, the cultural images of wizards and witches, fraternal orders, and shamanistic garments. The common denominator is the utilization of costuming as means of pageantry, uniformity, concealment, ritual, power, and awe.
Tammie Rubin is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signifiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics, while investigating the tension between the readymade and the handcrafted. Using intricate motifs, Rubin delves into themes involving ritual, domestic and liturgical objects, mapping, migration, magical thinking, and sensual desire. Her sculptures open up dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations. Rubin has widely exhibited, selected exhibitions include Women & Their Work, Austin, TX; the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX; Horton Gallery, San Joaquin Delta College, Stockton, CA; George Carver Museum, Austin, TX; Charak Gallery at Craft Alliance, St. Louis, MO; the Sarah M. Hurt Gallery at the Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN; Evansville Museum of Arts, History, & Science, IN; Rockford Art Museum, IL; and the Mulvane Art Museum, KS.
Born in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas, where she is an Associate Professor of Art at St. Edward’s University.