ABOUT

Porcelain casts of 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 Klu Klux Klan, the Catholic brotherhood of the Nazarenes, the cultural images of wizards and witches, and Mardi gras parade costumes. The common denominator is the utilization of costuming as means of pageantry, uniformity, concealment, ritual, power, and awe. The sculpture series Everything You Ever, the cone is paired with the wispy tendrils of Tillandsia  recurvata, ball moss. Native to Texas, ball moss to serve as a signifier of gathering chaos, connections, concentrated confusion, the labyrinth of values, and growing will. These sculptures are constructions of ball moss, knots, and tangles of twine, armatures of wire embedded with steel wool and cotton. The forms are then covered with colored porcelain slip; drowned, distorted and obscuring the original materials. Weighed down by porcelain the work is kiln-fired, all the organic material burns away leaving a transformed shell, a remnant and something new forged out of fire. This process is experimental and leads to spontaneous results. What will be lost and what will remain is unknown until Rubin opens the kiln after the final firing. She finds the ball moss an interesting object, a metaphor for the visible/invisible, the tension between internal and external perceptions, and physical/mental  pressure and distortion. 

Separating objects from their original function Rubin contemplate ideas of authenticity and the inherited symbolism in a form. She is interested in how objects, abstracted from any particular use of them, allow the mind to wander freely over a range of associations, to skip magically between different categories of experience. Relying on informed intuition and process, she transforms the familiar and trivial into the mythic and fantastical.  

Tammie Rubin is an artist whose sculptural practice considers the intrinsic power of objects as signi- fiers, wishful contraptions, and mythic relics. Using intricate motifs, Rubin delves into power of objects with themes concerning mapping, Black migration, magical thinking, longing, and identity. Rubin is the 2022 Tito’s Prize winner; her Bid Medium solo exhibition is spring 2023. Rubin has exhibited widely, selections include Project Row Houses, Houston, TX., the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, An- nandale-on-Hudson, NY., George Washington Carver Museum, Austin, TX., Mulvane Art Museum, KS., Indianapolis Art Center, Indianapolis, IN., The Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, TX., Women & Their Work Gallery, Austin, TX. She's represented by Galleri Urbane, Dallas, TX., and C24 Gallery, New York, NY. Rubin’s artwork has received reviews in online and print publications such as Artforum, Art in America, Glasstire, Austin American- Statesman, Austin Chronicle, Sightlines, fields, Conflict of Interest, Arts and Culture Texas, and Ceramics: Art & Perception. She founded Black Mountain Project along with fellow Austin-based artists Adrian Aguilera and Betelhem Makonnen, and she is a member of ICOSA Collective, a non-profit cooperative gallery. Born and raised in Chicago, Rubin lives in Austin, Texas where she is an Associate Professor of Ceramics & Sculpture at St. Edward’s University.

Past exhibitions:

Link to Exhibition Pages>>

I Pick Up My Life (2022) View Exhibition

Untitled Miami (2021)

The Gift Edit (2020)