Sculptures trace artist’s family history

In delicate yet trenchant sculpture, artist traces family history

Tammie Rubin, who teaches at St. Edward’s, debuts a new series of intricate, intimate and evocative porcelain artwork.

Tammie Rubin welcomes the tension people feel when they view her porcelain sculpture.

At De Stijl Gallery, Rubin’s sculptures are arranged on mantel-like shelves. Their detailed surfaces are textured with pinpoint-size porcelain dots and thread-thin glazed lines. The delicacy is captivating, as is the visceral immateriality.

And yet their conical forms with eyelike slits more than suggest hoods worn by the Ku Klux Klan.

“There is often beauty to be found in the mundane and even in the horrific,” Rubin says. After all, the form of a cone, she points out, is hardly specific to a Klan hood. Variations of conical hats echo throughout history and world cultures, from noblewomen in 15th-century France to the dunce’s cap of popular culture.

“And a cone can function as a filter or a transmitter of sound like megaphone,” she notes.

For Rubin, it’s less about a single interpretation of an object’s symbolism than it is about rec- ognizing the jumble of multitudinous meanings we usually bring to our interpretation of the world.

“I’ve always been interested in the way forms can mean many different things — how they traverse over a range of associations and historical allusions, how they often bring up conflicting conno- tations for us.”

The current exhibit at De Stijl Gallery is Rubin’s first in Austin. She relocated here a little more than a year ago when she joined the faculty at St. Edward’s University, where she teaches sculpture. For five years previous she was on the art faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The body of work she has exhibited nation allyformorethan the past decade features intensely colored forms, usually cast in porcelain from mass-produced consumer objects (toys, plastic food packaging, household tools) and almost surrealistically arranged, the surfaces intensely ornamented with bulbous dots, incised sinuous lines and stipples undulating

DAVE CREANEY/AMERICAN-STATESMAN For her first solo exhibit in Austin since moving to town last year, Tammie Rubin debuts a new series of intricate, intimate and evocative porcelain sculptures.

CONTRIBUTED BY DE STIJL GALLERY A detail of Rubin’s porcelain sculpture. The cone on the left bears a map showing southeastern states from which many AfricanAmericans migrated and the northern states they moved to.