Artist Q&A: Katie Zuppann x Mike Rubin

02 March 2011

Fashion Prints

One of my favorite SF art gals, Katie Zuppann, hit me up about showcasing an emerging artist that is not only her personal friend but also an exciting new face on the contemporary art scene. Her first contribution to this blog is an in-depth, personal interview with Mike Rubin to peel back the layers of his provocative street art, photography, sculpture, writing, and even performance art. Katie Z says it best herself:

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Ladies and gents, meet Mike Rubin. While working at Juxtapoz Magazine, I asked him if he would be open to exhibiting his work on our website, and now with a brand spanking new site of his own, he’s finally ready to share his creative genius with a greater audience. For lack of a better explanation, I truly believe he will be an important contributor to the art world in the coming decades.

I went to college with Mike in Santa Barbara and often saw him hauling massive and odd materials back to his house where, like some scientist in a laboratory, it seemed he spent countless hours in transforming these simple objects into a labyrinth of ingenuity. While traveling throughout South America, Mike talks here about his work, the individual’s subconscious, paying off the Peruvian Military, and why he’d like to work more closely with Tabasco sauce. -Katie Zuppann

Street installation in Bogota, Columbia

Katie Zuppann: When did you first feel compelled to make your own artwork? Did you grow up surrounded by art; did anyone help foster or inspire your interest?

Mike Rubin:  Although the interest was always there, I never took the practice seriously until college.  My parents believed I was destined for architecture at a young age when I developed an affixation for cardboard boxes and Duct tape.  Rather than playing in the yard or watching television I would render replicas and film stills out of recycled VCR, KitchenAid, and other unwanted home appliance boxes that no one else had a need for. It was here that I possibly became spatially aware through the reinvestigation and deconstruction of traditional cubic forms and applications.

Additionally, my grandmother, whose taste was composed of a peculiar interest in French and Japanese film and literature, would take my sister and I to local crafts fairs throughout our childhood.  Every other Sunday she would design a project for us to complete, or gear us in a direction she most likely imagined to be of dioramas, silkscreen prints, or watercolor paintings.  Though I was much more intent on developing life sized robot puppets and weaponized pieces of cardboard, her encouragement in conjunction with my parents support is most likely the extent to which I was fostered.

Dotar (Installation in Santa Barbara bar, Study Hall)

Q:  Instead of seeing a few canvases strung along a blank wall, I remember going to the opening party of your final art studio show in college and being blown away by the variety of mediums and overall caliber of the work. Large-scale photographic portraits, sculpture, a living room installation complete with self-recorded looping audio babble. It was so cohesive and polished.

Can you tell us what you were hoping to achieve and how your work has since evolved? Why did you sort of step away from pursuing art professionally these past few years, and what has brought you back in full effect?

In those early years as an art student it became difficult to resolve issues of projections and elitisms.  I found that my work had become favorable among peers and mentors, only with directly conflicting criticisms in a variety of capacities.  The work became inaccessible as the universal, and only inadvertently functioned to deliver intent to the academic.

The 2007 show: Who Do You Know Here? was organized around hyper-awareness of attendance.  The intention was to provide a crowd control, of sorts, in the gallery setting.  This was in direct regard to the faculty/student class division, while simultaneously dealing with notions of collective perception and consciousness.  The attempt was to provide a working environment of specifically designed, relatable objects, to the two diverse and segregated interests in the art world.  These two classes entered the environment with the personal intent of a gallery show visit, though the clinical control and response of the opposing parties was the work itself, whether those individuals knew it or not.

The Persuader

Currently, my work revolves around a similar concept of specifically tailored manifestations.  Only now I primarily focus on the singular’s sub-conscious, and that specific individual’s relationship to the particular realized object.

As for the past few years, I never really stepped ‘away from pursuing art,’ I only began to take it into a different direction.  There was a period where the concept of material manipulation was very important to me.  At the time I was noticing a return to craft and began to re-think the artist’s responsibility to it.  It was my belief that if I became a medical surgeon it would be the essential sculptural material with tangible effects in varying academic circles.  So, I enrolled at UC Berkeley, completed all pre-requisite admission course work, and passed the Medical College Admission Test, all to give it up in the end.  The reality of the end result was that I would be trading one profession for another, and my personal work isn’t something I’m capable of sacrificing.

Writing by Mike Rubin

Q: As I mentioned earlier, your work covers a broad range of mediums. Photography, sculpture, installation, writing… Do you utilize these varying mediums to more fully articulate yourself or do you have a more general curiosity about utilizing and experimenting with many mediums instead of just one or two?

The basis for working in an interdisciplinary fashion isn’t so much concerned with the modes themselves, but rather the work’s colligative demands.  Varying bodies of work present unique physical limitations; this enables them to dictate what particular medium may be best suited.  Although if I had to choose, I think I’d like to work more closely with Tabasco sauce.

Daughters of the American Revolution

Q: Your work has a sort of bold, nuanced, attentive feel to it; like you have something specific you are addressing or exploring in each piece. It’s not slapping up spray-painted stencils on a canvas or wall for the sake of getting your work out there. It feels urgent yet not pushy, almost waiting for the viewer to get it, or at least ascribe some sort of depth to it (“daughters of the american revolution” comes to mind here). Can you comment on this?

It irks me when artists, authors, or filmmakers treat their audience with condescending visual material.  Creating work or curating shows with titles like: Negative Space or Counterclockwise, seems to only further perpetuate a world consumed with readily accessible parallel images, that project art as Fashion rather than a progressive and necessary mode of thought.

I think that the average individual is more intelligent and capable of grasping than most account for.  I don’t believe in confining the viewer to a third person observer role with the work, but rather directly designing a tangible experience with that individual and said object.  Though my work isn’t intended to be a Rubik’s Cube, I do challenge the approximate four-second viewing time the average person spends on a particular image, by allowing a certain level of initial ambiguity to spark dialogue.

A series like: daughters of the american revolution, draws inspiration from artists like Charlie White, where the pictured image functions as an inverse of the character’s (and/or author’s) internalized perception of a daily circumstance.  Whether the viewer ‘get(s) it’ or ‘ascribe(s their own) sort of depth to it’ is entirely up to them.

S Curve

Q: One of my favorite series of works on your new website is “s-curve.” It features a friend, clad in business suit attire, sitting at the wheel of a car filled with packing popcorn. Tell us the story behind this piece.

As I mentioned earlier, my new body of work deals with realized objects drawn directly from an individual’s subconscious (i.e. dreams), and that individual’s relationship to the object.  s-curve is the first polished piece of research that touches upon the exercise.  In this case, the images are only footprints of the work, as the piece was more performance oriented.  The individual I placed behind the wheel was asked to drive around a designated city route and over the San Francisco Bay Bridge in repetition until I determined completion.  The monotony of the performance was correlated to the circumstances of the dream’s archetype from which it was drawn.  The discomfort, irritation, and overall circumstances experienced by the driver, were metaphysical reincarnations of non-linear emotions apparently experienced within the dream.  The photographs attempt to capture conceptualized moments that were originated within an individual’s subconscious.

Introspection of E.V.

Q: You have been traveling in South America for the past few months. How has this experience changed your outlook on life and art? What will you bring back, if anything, that will affect your artwork in the future? Any crazy stories?

I don’t think my experiences have changed my outlook on life or art very much at all.  I believe anytime I experience something outside routine it’s a notable experience, whether I’m on the road or not.  Its interjecting yourself into uncharted circumstances that’s has the potential for source material.

At one point my girlfriend and I decided against all advice to cross the Ecuadorian border into Peru, via the Rio Napo River in the Amazon.  There is no commercial boats or freighters you can hire, and no guarantee of a successful or safe passage.  As a result, we had to pay off the Peruvian Military at one point to let us eat with the recruits, string up hammocks at their base for the night, and then take us part of the way in the morning.  The experience was an interesting one, to say the least.

That said, I can understand the cult and romanticism that accompanies travel.  But as far as reflective changes as a result of it, I prescribe to the French author’s notion that the only thing truly beneficial about travel is fear.

Q: Lastly, do you have any future plans, project ideas, or general things we should watch out for?

I’ve been thinking about doing a short film adaptation of Knut Hamsun’s 1890 novel: Hunger, comprised entirely of pre-packaged fish from Costco.

Question for Caine

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