Nancy Rubins 3d Collage Progress

This is the base to a visual aid collage to "get" what Nancy Rubins is all about taken in a montage format.

Hugh M. Davies- curator of her San Diego Contemporary Art Museum's exhibit seem to quite rightly say that her works are "fantastic residue[s] of cataclysmic natural events" in 1995.

Initially I planned on doing this collage in a reverse fashion with clear resin and, like Nancy herself does with her immediate studio environments, assemble a collage of all my research notes on her and rearrange them in a way that reflect much more energy than the initial pages in my sketch book, all by my dropping my research notes into thinly poured resin layers lined with reinforcing mesh, so that the hard resin would be "flexible" in the same manner in which Rubins manipulated the conventional sense of hard concrete.

In lieu, this collage approach is images drawn from her most extreme ideas of material in her sculptures. The images included are those I deem most valuable to explain her periods of thought and her self-referential qualities in some as well.
Images of works integrated into the collage are:

Self- Portrait as Cake- 1973 (unfired large sculpture)

Drawing -1975 (as an undergraduate student)

Big Bil-Board- 1981

Worlds Apart- 1982

Mattresses and Cakes- 1993

Airplane Parts & Buildings, a Large Growth for San Diego (installation)- 1994

cont.

The aluminum sheet metal as a base with mesh metal wrapping and enveloping collage elements intend on picking up some of that ship-in-a-bottle feel to many of her installations-- as well as the looseness. Thimbles are integrated into the collage as recognition of the collection component to her work- and also in recognition to the physicality and "bigness" of the materials she uses which must be difficult to manage-- notably the cutting of trailers and airplanes in a way that outdoes Gordan Matta-clark and his dissection of houses.

What is missing is legibility to the viewer in this collage. I intend on integrating my key words (Overwhelming, Excessive, Gargantuous, Cellular and Organic, Contradictory, Fantastic, Nostalgic) next and some of Nancy's relevant background-- her husband Chris Burdens, her inspriration in "Grandma Brisbee" and some of her various cities she lived in-- definitely including the Mojave desert.