June 25 - August 2, 2012
- Reception: June 28, 6-8 p.m., Gallery Lounge, gallery talk by Tammie Rubin at 7 p.m.
- Music by the Prairie Syncopators
- June 27, additional lecture by Rubin, S building, 11am
Recognizable mass-produced objects take on new meaning in Illinois artist Tammie Rubin’s ceramic sculptures.
Rubin is an assistant professor in Ceramics and Foundations at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and earned the UIUC’s College of Fine and Applied Arts Creative Research Award in 2011. She received her MFA in ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle after receiving a BFA in art history and a BFA in ceramics at the University of Illinois.
Rubin’s sculptural ceramics borrow from pre-existing mass-produced objects. Seeing an inherent beauty in these consumer products she transforms these easily recognizable items into mythical and absurd objects. “My sculptures are assemblages of collected objects, the primary interest is transforming the familiar, disposable, and trivial into the mythic and fantastical,” Rubin said in an artist’s statement. “Utilizing the amorphous properties of clay while exploring its inherent materiality, I create fanciful sculptures that feel both familiar and alien.”
Image: Tammie Rubin, Diminutive but Hopeful Expectation Contraption