Cynthia Beth Rubin

biography

artist statement

list of recent
exhibitions

list of animation screenings

Texts: Reviews & Papers

BIOGRAPHY

Cynthia Beth Rubin is a visual artist working in 2D still imagery, inter-activity, animated images, and 3D imaging, who began experimenting with digital media in the early 1980’s. Trained as a painter, her work evokes cultural memories and the imagined past by intertwining photographic elements to create complex layers of representation and abstraction.

Rubin’s work has been exhibited and screened in such diverse venues as the Jewish Museum in Prague, and opening night of the both the San Francisco and the Boston Jewish Film Festivals, the Pandamonium Festival at the ICA in London, the Lavall Gallery in Novosibirsk, the DeLeon White Gallery in Toronto, and numerous editions of ISEA, ArCade and SIGGRAPH. Winner of the first award in New Media from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, she was recently awarded this grant for a third time. Other awards and residencies include the New England Foundation for the Arts, Videochroniques in Marseilles, CYPRES in Aix-en-Provence, and the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture. She works independently and in collaboration, and most recently organized the Cultural Heritage Artists Project for the Orchard Street Shul in New Haven, Connecticut.

Rubin writes: “My work is an investigation of the threads of cultural memory which I feel both from my own visual experiences, and through that mysterious transmission of sensibility which comes from some place beyond the individual. I am interested in how cultural traditions collide and merge, and how this is embedded in all of us. These images grow from the affinity between my life as a contemporary American, and what I regard as my heritage, extending to times, places, and philosophies far from my own experience. Echoing the ambiguity of memory, the computer is the instrument for allowing some images to sing, some to come forward as clear images, others to fall back into barely representational dreams of textures and colors. The inter-weaving of image fragments within the computer renders the texture of the memories, and creates a narrative out of final composition, even when it is rendered as a fixed two-dimensional print.”

As an outgrowth of the sister city relationship between New Haven and Avignon, France, Rubin has developed close ties to Provence. She participated in the 1999 and 1998 exhibitions Spiri/tu/elles I and II, near Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence, and the 1999 Journées des Images Professionals in Marseilles. While artist in residence at Vidéochroniques in Marseilles she produced a computer animation, les affinités recouvrées, which has been shown at major festivals around the world, including opening night of the Jewish Film Festival in San Francisco and the Boston Jewish Film Festival , and the ground-breaking 1996 Pandemonium Festival at the Institute for Contemporary art in London. Her recent animation, Inherited Memories, was shown at SIGGRAPH and at the 1998 inaugural show at the video screening room of the DeCordova Museum, as well as other festivals around the world.

Rubin’s work has been written about in publications throughout the world. Her 1988 digitally designed mural, created under the Arts in Public Spaces program of the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, was featured in an article by Martin Rieser in Printmaking Today. Other articles and television interviews have been appeared in Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, France, and Brazil. Her work is discussed extensively in The Computer in the Visual Arts by Anne Morgan Spalter, and is among the artists featured in The Art of the Digital Age by Bruce Wands, Painting the Digital River by James Faure Walker, and several other publications.

Rubin is a native of Rochester, NY and holds degrees from Antioch College and the Maryland Institute, College of Art (BA and MFA). She has been on the faculty of Frostburg State College, Connecticut College, and the University of Vermont, and currently is affiliated with the Rhode Island School of Design.

An active member of the Digital Arts coommunity, she currently servers as the Chair for the Committee for the Awrd for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art of ACM-SIGGRAPH, and is also a member of the SIGGRAPH Digital Art Committee. She has served as vice-president of ISEA, the Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts, and was a member for the CAA Committee of Electronic Information, as well as co-author of the CAA Guidelines for Faculty in New Media.