About
Bio
Carrie Rubinstein creates life-sized, full room installations from ink drawings, hollow constructed paper sculptures & paper casts. Her influences are a combination of direct observation and invention of the natural and architectural world. She also makes watercolors paintings based on these interests.
Rubinstein earned her BA in Studio Art from Smith College in the Ada Comstock Scholars Program and traveled to Prague on a Righteous Persons Foundation Fellowship to study Jewish history in Central Europe. She earned a Post-Baccalaureate degree from Brandeis University in Sculpture, and in 2007 earned an MFA in Sculpture from CUNY-Hunter College with an exchange semester at L’École des Beaux Arts, Paris. She makes full room environments from ink drawings and manipulating paper into sculpture. In 2013, she was a Vermont Studio Center sculpture resident. In September 2015, Brooklyn’s Rhombus Space hosted her first NYC solo show, Retrofit, and she was their August 2015 Artist-in-Residence. Hyperallergic highlighted the exhibition. In September 2017, she expanded Retrofit and the exhibition traveled to the Krasl Art Center in St. Joseph, MI for Rubinstein’s first solo museum show. In June 2017, she exhibited a solo installation, Found Underground, at Thomas Hunter Project Space, Hunter College. From October 2017-June 2018, she was a sculpture resident at Crosstown Arts, Memphis, TN. Brick Fiction, her solo installation, ran in their East Gallery December 2018-Jan 2019. Crosstown Arts produced a video biography of her work and Brick Fiction. In the summer of 2023, she revised Brick Fiction for the two-person show, Regarding Time & Memory at Brooklyn’s Cluster Gallery.
Artist’s Statement
I am interested in the raw beauty and history of old places. I create life-sized environments out of non-traditional construction materials, specifically paper. My references are a combination of memory and observation. In addition to drawing and painting on paper, I manipulate it sculpturally by bending, folding, cutting, tearing, hanging, and casting it. I am challenged and driven by the possibilities and limits of this organic material. It’s important for my hand to be recognizable and relatable throughout my work. It’s how I translate the observed world into concrete outer form through three-dimensional paper objects, sculptures, and drawings. My insistence in building all objects and creating all images by hand offers a counter-cultural presence to our ever-fast paced and increasingly digital lives.
The concepts of my recent solo exhibitions are founded on a combination of archival events and invented memory. I happily participate in contemporary life, yet am endlessly attracted to prior methodologies, their progressions, and transformations. The collective story of the past informs who we are today. I am motivated by the dichotomy of building representational space out of non-traditional construction materials. This natural tension drives me, and I continually seek to give it form.