Nancy Rubins

Nancy Rubins has been creating visually stunning sculptures out of salvaged industrial and consumer goods including mattresses, trailers, hot water heaters, airplanes and small appliances since the late 1970s. In her hands, such everyday objects become unfamiliar and astonishing, as they are trussed and finessed into heroic forms that defy both gravity and our expectations for how these things should behave. The sculptures may appear precarious but are, in fact, delicately balanced and precisely engineered. While her works are often read as social commentary on consumer society and technological obsolescence, Rubins is most interested in the formal properties, availability, and utilitarian beauty of the particular items with which she works. As she explains, "When I first starting collecting objects after graduate school, it was the quantity and variety that attracted me--and the idea that I could go to Goodwill and pay fifty cents for a whole carload of televisions with marvelous plastic consoles, antennas, and wiring. They had both an amazing appeal and an inherent sadness to them."
Nancy Rubins' ebuilient sculpture seems to drag everything along with it. In its explosive, turbulent gestures, Rubins, work can be aligned to the esthetic of the Baroque: theatrical in effect, her sprawling sculptures create a sense of vertigo. All curves and diagonals, Rubins, works form jagged, spiraling silhouettes that frustrate any attempt to locate a frontal or primary view. Her work is outsize, crackling with so much energy that it seems to continually shift and churn, to temporarily defy gravity.
In her attention-grabbing sculptures, Nancy Rubins achieves an unexpected monumentality with such gnarly mediums as wrecked airplane parts, derelict mobile homes, discarded appliances and trussed mattresses stuffed with gooey, rotting cakes. Beyond the poetic associations of their odd materials, critics have seen the sculptures as social commentary on topics ranging from environmental pollution to sexual abuse and eating disorders. Such far-flung interpretations, however, only scratch the surface of Rubins's much broader enterprise.