Cynthia Rubin
Artist Website: https://cbrubin.net/
About the Artist
Cynthia Beth Rubin began the transition from painting to digital imaging in the early 1980’s. In her work she explores the imagined sensations of the unseeable and unknowable. In this series she melds plankton and fragments of Hebrew Text and decorative patterns borrowed from the Leningrad codex, putting the microscopic life that is essential to our lives in the same space as the Hebrew manuscript produced in Old Cairo in 1006. Rubin's work has been recognized internationally through exhibitions and film festivals, including the Techspressionism exhibition, Creative Tech Week in New York City, the Jerusalem Biennial, the Jewish Museum in Prague, the Siberia State Art Museum, the Kyrgyzstan State Museum, and in cities such as Paris, New York, Toronto, Montreal and elsewhere around the world, and numerous editions of SIGGRAPH and ISEA. Rubin’s awards include multiple Connecticut Artist Fellowships, the New England Foundation on the Arts, among others, and artist residencies in France, Israel, Canada, and Scotland. These works incorporate her return to drawing on paper, as she explores microscopic life photographed by scientists in the Menden-Deuer lab at the University of Rhode Island.
Plankton and Hebrew Manuscripts, 2020-2022
Statement about Work
Rubin explores imagined sensations of the unseeable and unknowable, interweaving microscopic plankton that is essential for our survival with fragments of Hebrew Text and decorative motifs from the Leningrad codex, produced in Cairo in 1006.
The roundness project pushed Rubin to think in new ways. Choosing a Hebrew manuscript produced in Old Cairo in about 1008 filled with circles made of micrography, she embraced the challenge, not just for the structure, but as an opportunity to research new inspirational sources. When she mixed this source with drawings of round plankton, Rubin found herself drawing a memory of peering into the deep ocean, into a space devoid of visible life and with no discernible bottom.
These works mark her return to gestural drawing as she responds to her own digital manipulations of micro-photographs by oceanographers in the Menden-Deuer lab at the University of Rhode Island, through iterations of print, drawing, and computer imaging.
