I first heard about muons—the recently discovered subatomic particle, upending our known laws of physics—from the artist Nancy Rubins. Through her artwork, she concerns herself with no less than trying to understand the universe. When words fail to express her fascination with how we came to be here, her explosive, monumental sculptures do the talking.
Reclaiming heaps of junked material from airplane parts, canoes, trailers, playground equipment, lawn sculptures, and more, Rubins challenges herself to place these seemingly unwieldy objects into harmony. The final works achieve a precarious-yet-inevitable balance of weight, volume, and rhythm. It’s painting with giant heaps of metal, an almost whimsical mark-making in three dimensions instead of two—a truly formal exercise.
At the same time, these stunning feats of suspension are not meant to evoke a mystery. Rubins shows her work with a clearly visible webbed girding of tensile cables. It’s not magic, she insists, it’s physics. Maybe so, but I suspect she relishes suspending your disbelief. In that tension, she gets at the diminishing edges of what’s knowable and what we take on faith.
It is tempting to read Rubins’s re-formations of industrial detritus in the United States as a consumerist critique, but that would very much miss the point. She is genuinely moved by what she often calls the “exquisite” beauty of her materials—an airplane wing’s prim line of bolts against gleaming metal, the hollowed curving interior of a cast iron alligator. Most wouldn’t choose that word to describe them. That’s the beauty of Rubin’s extraordinary eye and sensibility: with her sculptures, she makes them so.