Charity Coleman on Eleen Lin and Tammie Rubin
Eleen Lin and Tammie Rubin insightfully reinterpreted fiction and historical past in “Mythodical” at C24 Gallery. The title parses the present’s themes of non-public and cultural mythologies—each the making and undoing thereof—and the way every artist brings technique to that insanity. The curatorial pairing of Lin (painter) and Rubin (sculptor) was a complementary one, with every presenting work that spanned a number of years, demonstrating how their particular person practices have advanced and deepened over time.
Rubin’s broad coterie of serialized objects—greater than a decade’s value—had been an exploratory index of lineage, lamentation, and groupings. Among the many works on show, the Austin-based African American artist offered a latest iteration of 19 variously glazed cones from the sequence “All the time & Eternally (perpetually ever, ever)?” 2016–, made out of pigmented porcelain. The verdigris-colored helmet-like varieties fluctuate in width and top, however all share textured patterned surfaces created through sgraffito, braille-like extrusions, and inlays. Their hooded shapes and cutout eyeholes known as to thoughts Philip Guston’s grotesque cartoon Klansmen. Rubin’s objects are affecting: There’s something each somber and sardonic about their motley un-sameness; the funnel shapes additionally resemble dunce caps, spiritual contrafraternity headgear, and stupas.
There’s an ebullience to a lot of Rubin’s sculptures as properly, as in A Joyous Ripening, Salaam, and The Fantastic thing about Insignificance, all 2014—three bulbous stacks of spherical varieties in glowy earthen colours. These elegantly assembled agglomerations appeared delightfully animate. Silence Magical Pondering, 2009, comprised a number of mobile-like aggregations strung from the ceiling in a single nook of the gallery, tilting at attentive angles. They weren’t merely perky however had a communicative high quality akin to vintage listening to trumpets, gramophone audio system, or satellites. Throughout every sequence, Rubin’s varieties had been dexterous shape-shifters that could possibly be playthings one second and quiet reliquaries the following.
Lin’s vivid, large-scale, and dreamy oil-and-acrylic work, remodeled the course of a decade, riffed on wonky Mandarin translations of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851). Her backgrounds, constituted of skinny washes of acrylic, literalize the novel’s nautical setting—the liquescence can be a nod to the fluidness of Chinese language ink work. Lin’s compositions are swimmy and relentlessly vivid. Based mostly in New York, the Taiwanese-born painter engages many sides of tradition and historical past. What’s misplaced (or added) in translation will not be a quandary for Lin, however an opportunity to delve additional into odd serendipities whereas inventing new morphologies.
These reworkings of the novel’s scenes and themes present one thing each retro sci-fi (as fanciful as Jules Verne’s 1870 novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Below the Sea) and hypercontemporary. The suspenseful and doomy Perils of Life, 2022, exhibits an inflatable boat, crowded with folks, adrift. One face is skeletal, a demise’s-head, whereas a lonesome determine sits atop an upturned rowboat close by. One other vessel is unoccupied, tied up with rope or fishing line. On the water’s floor is a white whale or a jellyfish with outstretched tentacles—an oozing, ectoplasmic blob, a factor of horror and fantasy unexpectedly. The work’s title echoes Moby-Dick’s language: “All males dwell enveloped in whale-lines. All are born with halters spherical their necks; however it is just when caught within the swift, sudden flip of demise, that mortals notice the silent, refined, ever-present perils of life.” The artist out-Melvilles Melville with polychromatic ocean beasts, transcontinental and transcultural crossings, and intergalactic geometries that every one collude to kind a brand new fiction born of lacunae. Seeing the work of Lin and Rubin—collectively however separate—made for adventurous viewing, every artist rewriting the narratives at each flip.
— Charity Coleman
