Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery pleased to present A Ticking Sound, the first solo gallery exhibition of the work of Ben Rubin.
Combining video, computer software, and LED displays, acclaimed multimedia artist Ben Rubin has created five new works that investigate the nature of communication and the means by which information is processed. The exhibition draws on a number of diverse references, from modernist literature to internet diaries to the traffic outside Rubin's studio.
Ulysses (2006) utilizes large-scale dot-matrix characters set behind an acrylic diffusion panel to display, in order, all of the six-letter words in James Joyce's masterwork, creating an alternate version of the text while retaining its unique characteristics. Running in a 24-hour loop, the piece follows the passage of time in the novel, which takes place over the course of a full night and day.
The Quiet Ticking of Dreams (2006) uses twelve green vacuum florescent displays, to showcase scrolling text from five hundred online dream journals. The piece simultaneously demonstrates the impossibility of accurately representing dream states and the authors' desire to make sense of their unconscious experiences to themselves and others.
In Sand Storm (2006) Ben Rubin scanned a photograph of the orange blaze of the dessert region engulfed in a sand storm, taken during US reconnaissance missions in the early days of the Iraq war and transferred the digital file across twelve vertically stacked LED tubes. The result yields an abstract sea of orange light, which undulates in time with the passage of the shadows of helicopters and the sunlight creeping through the clouds.
In Something Is Boiling (2006) a wall of LED tubes displays the socio-political statement "something is boiling" superimposed on top of an image of Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can rotating on its axis. The tension and friction of these paradoxes produces a stunning slogan of our times.
For Traffic, Rubin videotaped the activity of cars and pedestrians outside his lower East side studio. He then transferred the footage to two LED tubes to create an abstract dance of colors racing up and down at alternating speeds.
Rubin's emphasis on text and his examination of the tension between signs and signifiers situates his work in relation to the signboards of Jenny Holzer, the word plays of Ed Ruscha, the musical experiments of John Cage, and the experiential installation art of Robert Irwin.
"Any language, spoken or written, is a code, a way of transmitting meaning between people, at one time or another," Rubin says. "Several of the pieces I have made, play with the notion of codes, how via sound and image, you can reveal what Thomas Pynchon refers to as the 'intent to communicate.'"
Ben Rubin was born in 1964 in Boston, Massachusetts. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science and Semiotics from Brown University and a Master of Science in Visual Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Most recently, Rubin and collaborator Mark Hansen were awarded the Golden Nica-first prize-in the Prix Ars Electronica for their acclaimed work Listening Post. Rubin has also received the Best Documentary Award from the Third Coast International Audio Festival. Rubin has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York; the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; La Villette Numérique, Paris; and the Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. Rubin currently lives and works in New York.