Cynthia Beth Rubin
Cynthia Beth Rubin ’s work flows across many forms of new media, including prints, videos, and interactive works. As an early adopter of digital imaging, she transitioned from drawing and painting in the early 1980’s; recently direct gesture drawing has crept back into her digital art. Based in New Haven, her studio practice extends to New York City, Narragansett RI and beyond.
Rubin is artist-in-residence in the Menden-Deuer lab at the University of Rhode Island, School of Oceanography, thus her practice includes participation at weekly lab meetings with scientists studying the habits and habitats of plankton and their predators. Recent prints and videos produced in collaboration with the lab explore the question of how we bring empathy, awareness, and curiosity to the unseen or rarely seen life of the ocean and of microscopic life.
Since the pandemic, Rubin has been experimenting with combining plankton with medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, drawing on research she undertook in the late 1980s in exploring the motifs of cultural distinction in a tradition of ongoing commentary, reinterpretation, and embellishment. Today she considers how the unknown meanings implied in the layered text interrelate with the unknown in science, but also she simply is impressed by the similarities in pattern and form between microscopic life and decorative patterns developed hundreds of years ago.
Asterionellopsis Glacia with
Ceratium and Hebrew Letters
This series intertwines two seemingly very different aspects of our lives as humans on Earth: expressive representations of microscopic marine life coexist with and a beautiful cultural Artifact in the form of a Hebrew Bible from more than a thousand years ago, created in Old Cairo. Visually, the forms of the plankton and the decorative forms of the Leningrad Codex fit so perfectly that it was a bit unsettling when I first put them together. Together, they stir our imagination and push our thoughts to the unseen aspects of our World which are vital to our existence as the more visible physical homes, large life forms, and interpersonal relationships.
