Glen Rubsamen (USA) - Stene Projects

Glen Rubsamen (USA)

La Biennale De Lyon
Sept 15 - Dec 31

Introduction

My pictorial investigations are characterized by a documentary interest in compiling, like collectibles, situations in nature of great dramatic intensity, such as sunrises and sunsets, exuberant vegetation or images of the apocalypse. Working primarily as a painter but also with drawing, printmaking and video. I am attempting to isolate the idea of a ‘post-nature’ defined as a place were space is shrinking, were objects in the landscape play no part in any synthesis; they have no memory, they simply bear witness during a journey. In my view of ‘post-nature’, beauty is not lost: it has just become ambivalent. These characteristics in my work, combined with the absence of human presence, the tendency towards monochrome and the lack of spatio-temporal references create an atmosphere charged with austere quietude and spirituality. I paint a nature where the organic appears in artificial images. /Glen Rubsamen

Reality does not need friends/Endless Passing, 2011

At Stene Projects, Glen Rubsamen presents two new video works which investigate the relationship between horizontal and vertical in natural and post-natural environment settings. In the first video entitled Reality doesn't need friends a palm tree arrives after traveling thousands of miles by truck and cargo ship at it's final destination and new home, a commercial center in southern California. It's traveling is done in a reclining position but it must be planted vertically so that it can grow and thrive, the video documents this simple but strange metamorphosis. The second video entitled Endless Passing depicts the movement of an enormous herd of antelope past a stationary palm in the Okavanga delta of north-eastern Botswana. The palms which are propagated in the wild by the migrating herds, seeds are eaten in one spot of the migration and redeposited days later, represent the physical manifestation of this horizontal-vertical paradox. In both works Rubsamen defines the relationship between Portrait and Landscape as image format, landscape implies horizontal movement and migration, the portrait format on the other hand implies identity and place. Rubsamen's exploration of the essential and profound difference between the vertical and the horizontal as compositional device is made more profound by the juxtaposition in the two videos of pure nature in Botswana and Post-nature in the commercial center, ironically both scenarios have a similar botanical agenda.

Reality does not need friends, 2011
(installation view, Stene Projects)