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Rebecca Rutstein - Artist Statement My recent paintings and installation grow out of a deep-rooted fascination with geology, maps, and the changing natural world. Plate tectonics is an amazing process of continents adrift, breaking apart, colliding and grinding against each other, always in a state of dynamic flux. In my work, these geologic forces become metaphors for interpersonal relationships. I interweave topographic mappings, organic forms, and other imagery into densely layered spaces that hover between atmospheric and graphic, linear and volumetric, abstract and real. Land forms morph into anatomical structures in imaginary worlds that are constantly shifting in scale and perspectives. "Abyss" explores the deep ocean floor. Using ship track data,
topographic maps and other material as a springboard, I have envisioned
the body that spans so much of our globe, the place where geologic processes
begin, and the world that, even today, holds such profound mystery. - Rebecca Rutstein, 2007 Rebecca Rutstein "Abyss" by Matt Singer "No man is an island," so the saying goes. Among the epiphanies revealed in Rebecca Rutstein's art is the realization that no island is an island, either-it is a mountain, only partially obscured by water. Rutstein leads us beneath the surface. We see that, far from isolated, islands are landmarks in submerged landscapes as vast, varied, and beautiful as anything on terra firma, the world of our walking, waking lives. But like dreams and distant planets, much of the sea-bed remains a mystery. Though part of this thoroughly traversed, studied, and exploited Earth, "the deep" remains a frontier-remote and uncharted. While oceanic depths inspire awe and wonder in Rutstein, her work is "about" more than sea or land. It is an evolving meditation on life and love; geology, biology, and psychology; nature and nurture; past, present, and future; the terrestrial and extraterrestrial; documentation and dreaming. But the revelatory shift in perspective, the elegant challenge to preconceived perception that renders an island a mountain (and back again), is central to Rutstein's vision. Rutstein is fascinated by plate tectonics, the study of how the Earth's crust folds, slides, collides, and erupts along fault lines. In this movement of the Earth's surfaces she finds metaphors for human relationships-layered and complex individuals coming together and pulling apart, alliances shifting, connections lying dormant or growing volatile. Rutstein's paintings remind us that we humans-layers of epidermis punctuated by orifices and scars, skin stretched across bone, swollen by muscle, softened by fat, concealing constellations of organs and galaxies of veins, driven by the mercurial mysteries of intellect and psychology, temporary repositories for the mechanics of life and agents in existence-are not so unlike our complicated world, with its substrata supporting an unstable crust, molten core, protuberant mountains, creases of valleys, recesses of ocean, exploding volcanoes, fissuring faults, networks of rivers, interdependent ecosystems, and cycles of creation and destruction, all driven by forces of nature so majestic and ineffable that we've spent millennia variously forming, propounding, arguing, reforming, and rejecting ideas of a creating and guiding God. Tectonics are both message and medium for Rutstein. Pushing personal and artistic boundaries, she asks "How many disparate elements can cohabitate on a canvas?" Her paintings answer that question. Expansive and enveloping, they are built of overlapping and conjoined motifs. Wholly abstract passages co-exist with fully realized mountain ranges and cliffs (Rutstein titled this show Abyss). Mesh forms suggest the undulating grids of a topographer's relief-map, computer scans of the human body, and fishing nets. Twisting, ropey shapes evoke seaweed, lava flows, arteries, intestines, and umbilical cords. Lozenge-shaped clouds above are echoed in sinuous shadows below. Clusters of familiar decorative flourishes are redolent of the dizzying density of Victoriana, psychedelia, and much contemporary graphic design. Signs of human habitation and exploration-geodesic domes, futuristic pods, tents, airplanes, a submarine-stealthily stake-out territory. In Rutstein's paintings we are grounded, underwater, aloft. We are out of body and beneath our own skin. In them, it is yesterday, today, and tomorrow; here, there, and everywhere; always and all at once. Rutstein's passion for things geological-that is, her love for and engagement with the world around her-combined with rampant talent and drive to investigate and invent, have been rewarded with residencies in the Limestone Mountains of the Canadian Rockies and Na'alehu (The Big Island), Hawaii. Her previous shows reflected these extended immersions in and study of two of the Earth's most spectacular environs. This show gestated much closer to home-in a basement studio in Rutstein's home. An artist with a demonstrated urge to wonder and wander, Rutstein worked at home and underground throughout her recent pregnancy (during which she produced a masterpiece named Oliver). Her physical self somewhat limited in mobility and constrained by circumstances, removed from direct observation of the natural vistas that inspire her, Rutstein's imagination-her inner world-blossomed. The Abyss Rutstein confronted was the depth of her own creativity. She pondered, explored, documented, and collected. She brought newfound treasures and wonders to the surface. They are all around you. - Matt Singer, 2007, Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, and
Writer, Philadelphia Museum of Art
While Rebecca Rutstein's paintings do not immediately appear to be about the drama and pain of personal relationships, the titles lead us in that direction-topsy-turvy, you move me, i couldn't sleep last night. Rutstein is essentially an abstract painter even though she often uses recognizable images borrowed from the realm of geology-maps, diagrams, land formations. These images provide, first and foremost, a formal vocabulary that anchors her compositions. But they also tether her emotional paintings to the world of reason and science. We immediately have to wonder why Rutstein revisits over and over this apparently cool and concrete scientific material in her work. What we notice is that the would-be academic information is set-off by the artist to reveal a latent emotional and dramatic content. Rutstein's paintings reveal something deeper-she looks to the earth for the emotional energy it seems to have absorbed through time. The striations, layers of material, evidence of explosions and lava flows, the stalactites and stalagmites formed patiently over time, all are metaphors for the human psyche. Looking across a number of Rutstein's paintings, we are left with the impression of a diary of sorts. The repeated square format of the paintings gives them a consistency not un-like the pages of a book. Each painting captures the tenor of a particular moment. For Rutstein perhaps the search for some truth about the human world, and our emotional lives in it, has lead her to look past whatever more obvious philosophies and religious beliefs might tell us and to an older and more tangible source of truth-the earth beneath our feet. The artist looks to geology not for what it might revel about the earth, but for what it might reveal about the humans that inhabit it. Jessica Hough Jessica Hough is curatorial director at The Aldrich Contemporary Art
Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut.
Catalogue Essay - "Love and Subduction" "Love and Subduction," the title of Rebecca Rutstein's exhibition, is a clever combination of words that speak to the overriding theme of this group of new paintings: narrative conveyed through the visual languages of science and personal iconography. Love is the easy part-it is manifested through Rutstein's love of peak experience, landscape, place, and things. The paintings were the result of a residency at the Banff Center in the Canadian Rockies, an inspirational place where the artist became awestruck by the geological and topographical sublime. The love of the landscape is highlighted in the artist's almost obsessive attention to rendering it through a number of representational modes including scientific diagrams and illustration, mapping, and choice of color. Quirky images of objects meaningful to the artist share space with landscape and diagrammatic imagery. Love is also pronounced in a universe of pet icons. The artist's love of shoes of comes forth in several paintings. Canopy beds, where love is made, are another reoccurring motif. But what on earth is "Subduction?" Subduction is actually a geologic term that describes a phenomenon in which dense oceanic plates of earth are pushed under lighter continental plates. At the meeting of these plates, fault lines and volcanoes form, with often dramatic results on the earth's surface. As in human relationships, the relationships between terrestrial plates can often prove volatile, or at least exciting. The intensity of the light experienced at the high altitude of the Canadian Rockies inspired Rutstein to embrace a bright palette, using vividly colored grounds on which more detailed imagery is painted and screen printed. Color deployed across the picture plane, screen-printed images, digitally-designed drawings, and use of acrylic paint marks a departure from her previous work. The tight, graphic quality of these paintings is altogether different from her earlier more gestural and expressionistic oil painting style. One might guess that the flatness and crispness of these paintings is attributable to Rutstein's "other" profession as a graphic designer. Rutstein's colorful palette and use of "girly" motifs also imbues the work with a degree of feminine sensibility that counterbalances the masculine underpinnings of the scientific enterprise-scientific visual representation, as discussed above, serves as a central element in this body of work. In effect, Rutstein constructs loosely woven narratives based on the metaphorical play between the forces that catalyze change in her daily life and the more powerful (yet more slow moving) geologic forces at work in nature. Her project is ultimately existential: to find meaning in the relationship between humble humanness and the overwhelming power, complexity, and history of planet earth. Rutstein never falls into the binary trap of the nature/culture divide. As she has pointed out, the Candian Rockies are composed of layers of decomposed organisms deposited over 500 million years ago. This mountain range is literally made up of our ancestors. We, therefore, are inextricably a part of the ground we tread upon. Alex Baker
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