ASHLEY LANDRUM & NANO RUBIO: THE LEVITY OF TRANSLATION
Ashley Landrum
Landrum's practice as a sculptor relies on mirroring and moire effects that activate perception through shifting layers of allegorical information. Her sculptures are often constructed using metallic scaffolding, painterly substrates, fabricated surfaces or any number of welded materials. These items might be super-added to shimmering fabrics, delicate textures and taught systems of suspension that invite a type of looking that is simultaneously pleasurable and restricted - or even pleasurable in its restrictions. Moving between the discourses that surround transversal painterly spaces and deconstructed sculptural affects, Landrum's work offers us a contained interaction that isn't overtly about its status as-such. Instead, her pieces play with a mixed genealogy of historical and contemporary precedents that challenge the ways in which we consider the sculptural object, its phenomenological precepts and its epistemological comport. The fluctuating boundaries of Landrum's works evidence a rare instance of complexity that exceeds the common conditions of historical measure and dialogic interlocution - a sure mark of their purchase in the present.
Nano Rubio
Rubio's abstract paintings unfold a logic of performative designs and gestural actions that display an incongruent topology of time-based inscriptions. Often reading as different lines of code - linear, scrapped, squeegeed and imposted - his works operate as a virtual catalog of conflicted cartographies. Playing with stark oppositions between light and dark space, rich and muted color, and theatrical figure/ground relations, Rubio's aesthetic program courts a distinctive neobaroque sensibility centered around issues of translation and transference. By working with an expanded vocabulary of non-traditional tools Rubio's images produce forms of misidentification that renew the radicality of process-based work through fracture and virtuosity. Such paintings represent a profound mediation on the dialect relation of self and systemicity, affect and dictation, performance and interruption. In such an inquiry, every form of visual refrain marks a new relation to systems of information display that extend from the programs of seventeenth century painting to the digital worlds of today.