LANDLINE. EMILE RUBINO
(WITH KONRAD KLAPHECK)

PRESENTED BY
WHITNEY HUBBS AND LUCAS BLALOCK

AUGUST 5 - 28. 2021
Reception on Thursday, August 5, 4-6 PM

Landline is an opportunity to exhibit two new photographic works by Emile Rubino. Here they are in dialogue with a 1976 lithograph by the German artist Konrad Klapheck. Rubino, a young French photographer, who studied in Vancouver and New York and now lives in Brussels, works the semantic "in-between" of a medium that often presents in a much more declarative register.

Rubino's two photographs exhibited here, of a mouth pressed in a hard kiss on the surface of an iPhone, and of a bulb style cable release twixt the artist's butt cheeks, together suggest relations between the body and its tools; and between means of knowing (through imaging, bodily investigation, erotic encounter, etc.) and those of digestion.

Klapheck's print of a stylized telephone handset might be understood as an earlier moment in the same vein; grounding tech through the body and drawing a line from mouth to ass.

Emile Rubino (French, b. 1992, Stavanger, Norway) currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Rubino received his MFA from ICP-Bard, New York, NY and BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada. Solo exhibitions include Friends & Laundry, Island, Brussels, Belgium; other things, ICP-Bard MFA Studios, New York, NY; Real Allegory, Spare Room, Vancouver, Canada; and horizontal, linear or melodic, Avenue, Vancouver, Canada. Rubino co-edits Le Chauffage (french for “The Heater”), an artist-run publication based in Brussels. It is conceived as a cross-continental, community oriented platform. This is Rubino's first exhibition with SITUATIONS.