Rita McBride & Glen Rubsamen — Daily Echo Free Mirror

Artist Reception: Friday, September 1, 2023, 6pm

Exhibition Duration: September 1 – October 14, 2023

Opening Hours: Tue-Fri 11am to 6:30pm, Sat 11am to 5pm

'Daily Echo Free Mirror' is an exhibition about 'Shoppers'. 'Shopper' is the trade name for a newspaper that is more than two-thirds advertising. A free publication that people pick up for the  ads, and that no one really reads. A paper that has editorial content mainly for the purpose of self-respect. The 'Village Voice', published in New York City from 1955 until 2017, perhaps the most influential alternative newspaper of the last 60 years, which in many respects a 'Shopper'. It contained almost 80 percent advertising in most issues.Rita McBride and Glen Rubsamen investigate the 'Shopper' phenomena through the juxtaposition of paintings and objects that create a mise-en-scene in which the structures and support systems of intimate and local entrepreneurism are revealed. These sculptures and paintings explore commercial systems based on a culture of vanity and self-involvement. According to McBride and Rubsamen the new consumer chooses to allow themselves to be manipulated, they conspire in their own seduction. The 'Shopper' is a by-product of this collusion. The skill of the shopper is, after all, to be broadly attentive, to search for what is needed, to keep an eye out for what is forgotten and to be open to surprises. These new works of Rita McBride and Glen Rubsamen invite you to do the same.

Rita McBride, born 1960 in Des Moines, Iowa, is an artist and educator who ponders the promises of modernism and the freedom of access though capitalistic design and structures of dissemination.A carbon fiber tower, architectural model scaled parking garages and turgid ancient keys in bronze populate her oeuvre among other vocabularies categorized as "machines for living". Her work has been exhibited and is represented in collections of major art institutions around the world. Her many public projects engage with communities and politics in the US and Europe. Since 2003, she is a professor of Art and Architecture at the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf where she served as the Director from 2012-2016. Large scaled works are currently on view at the Dia Art Foundation in Beacon, New York and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California.

Glen Rubsamen, born 1957 in Los Angeles, California, is a painter who contravenes the existing treaties of the landscape genre, applying the strict rules of atmospheric classicism in exactly the wrong ways; using shadow to create depth and luminosity for flatness. In his paintings dawn mixes with dusk while mythic characters struggle in the foreground like titans. These titans turn out to be merely commercial plaza signage, ancient palm trees and upstart street lamps. May 36 Gallery has been working together with the artist since 1999.