I am at my best when I’m escaping

Tammie Rubin
Presented in partnership with Big Medium

The exhibition, I am at my best when I’m escaping, delves into the artist’s fascination with power objects, coded symbols, migration, rituals, and faith. Rubin employs ceramic conical forms, raised maps, and murals to create spaces of metaphysical, physical, and spiritual escape and relocation. Using imagery and objects of the familiar, she contemplates ideas of authenticity and inherited meanings while inviting new considerations that open dream-like spaces of unexpected associations and dislocations.

Rubin muses Big Medium’s gallery as a portal of escape. Referencing Underground Railroad quilts, she uses the patterns as symbolic anchors of Black American freedoms. Both the individual and collective seizure of physical and mental autonomy. Emanating from painted murals, she creates abstracted topographic “maps,” composed of stake flags, porcelain, wire, foam, wood, bells, fencing, porcelain, and readymades. Rubin intertwines her own American Citizenry by weaving in family narratives and images through Masonite prayer fans and plotted drawings. Conical sculptures dot the space referencing hoods, headdresses, and helmets. Totemic-like, the sculptures manifest power, awe, horror, magical thinking, and spirituality. Intimating West African and Aboriginal headdresses, capirote hats, and cone-wearing figures striving for fraternity, anonymity, and pageantry. The sculpture surfaces are adorned with attachments. Are they treasure or detritus, offerings of thanks, or wards of protection?

This award is an extraordinary gift of time and exploration. Rubin thanks the Tito’s Handmade Vodka, Big Medium, the 2022 Curatorial Panel Allison Glenn, writer and independent curator; Elyse Gonzales, Director of Ruby City Museum in San Antonio; and Coka Treviño, Curator and Director of Programming at Big Medium.