NO SAINTS IN L.A.

Joseph Rubinstein is hovering over my body. As my eyes gloss over and my body goes limp – my arms cradling a chainsaw – I’m aware that my Sister is lying next to me and I’m being covered in filmy plastic. But for Rubinstein, I’ll play dead any day.

My Sister brought me to tonight’s reception to see a man by the name of Joseph Rubenstein open his first Los Angeles show at a Gallery called Integrated Circus, a multimedia showroom for (as the owners Loni and Viktor say) “anything we happen to like.” It is only their second gallery reception. Joe is a photographer, whose recent contemplation of our relationship to death brought him to tonight’s offerings: a handful of saturated photographs of murdered and bloody young, beautiful women. Though the deaths are artificial and cosmetic, they could come out of any crime drama.

Photography with either a camera or phone is prohibited at this exhibition, so I’m allowed only a picture of the front of the gallery but here’s the point of tonight’s artwork:

“Death in our culture has morphed from a sacred or at least natural part of life to become the most sensationalized part of our everyday story telling. Crime Dramas like “CSI” focus so much on the prevention of the “Next Victim” that they forget to slow down and understand the initial exchange that is driving the story. The original victim’s body is fragmented and turned into factors in an equation. The human cost is largely ignored, and because of it we, the audience, develop a build up of these deaths that we know so much about, but have never really stopped to look at. I am offering a chance to stand and stare at a fictionalized death. The images I create are beautification, idealization, creative interpretations of death the same way CSI is an idealization of the criminologists. By creating the fantasy of it, I am giving the viewer emotional license to look at the body and try to see themselves in it. In photos of real death we feel too perverse, too indignant to explore them. It becomes very difficult to integrate those photos into the collection of stories in our minds. My goal is to create images that help us understand these stories, and maybe their relationship to ourselves.”

THEY CALL ME JOE / POLITE IN PUBLIC

Tags: Art, Integrated Circus Gallery, Joseph Rubenstein, NaBloPoMo, Photography, Polite in Public, The Leading Victim, They Call Me Joe