Nancy Rubins, Monochrome for Austin, 2015. Photo: Paul Bardagjy
Note: the following is part of Glasstire’s series of short videos, Five-Minute Tours, for which commercial galleries, museums, nonprofits and artist-run spaces across the state of Texas send us video walk-throughs of their current exhibitions. This will continue while the coronavirus situation hinders public access to exhibitions. Let’s get your show in front of an audience.
See other Five-Minute Tours here.
Monochrome for Austin is a public artwork by artist Nancy Rubins. The piece, commissioned by Landmarks, UT’s public art program, is installed outside the Norman Hackerman Building at UT Austin.
“Nancy Rubins’ sculptures combine delicacy and indomitable strength, a polarity that is striking when encountered outdoors. She used found objects like hair dryers and toaster ovens to compose her early works. By the late 1980s, Rubins’ constructions had reached colossal proportions, adding trailer homes, water heaters, mattresses, fighter jet wings and fuselages to the materials tethered together. Monochrome for Austin boasts seventy recycled aluminum canoes and small boats and brings to the fore the grace of unpainted metal forms.
As a draftsman, Nancy Rubins maneuvers paper and graphite in unorthodox ways, using them as materials to form constructions. Simply named ‘drawings,’ they have a physical presence and spatial dynamism of sculptures in the round. These fully three-dimensional works are robust survivors of a working process that leaves them battered, gouged, and ripped; the resulting rough-edged configurations, gathered into folds, resemble sheets of gleaming lead that challenge viewers to reconsider the defining attributes of a drawing.”
The below video is for UT Landmarks, courtesy of GalleryLOG.
