Nathania Rubin

I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head

SARDINE is pleased to present I Think I Made You Up Inside My Head, a screening of video work by Nathania Rubin. It will run for two nights only on Thursday, July 14 and Friday, July 15, 2016 from 6 to 9pm each night.

Though short in duration, Rubin’s videos are laborious productions. Each minute of video represents 720 drawn alterations. The animations are produced through a process of pencil drawing and erasure. The drawings themselves ebb and flow along with the identity of Rubin’s characters. Some faces are hybrids involving cultural or historical icons such as Nina Simone, Sylvia Plath, Anne and Margot Frank. Others are faceless, shifting figures.

Many animations are drawn based on in-studio performances and constitute a kind of puppeteering whereby a public face acts as a mask for the artist. Others, namely Crowded, are formed via stream-of- consciousness wherein the drawing leads to more drawing and produces narrative fragments as biproduct. Rubin’s work examines the ways in which we project our own ideas of self onto others and the precarity of identity from one moment to the next.

Nathania Rubin lives and works in Berlin, Germany. She is originally from New York City and received her MFA from CUNY, Queens College. She held a two year fine arts research fellowship at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands.