08/05/2021
Opening today! Whitney Hubbs & Lucas Blalock present LANDLINE: EMILE RUBINO WITH KONRAD KLAPHECK
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.
