Nathania Rubin
‘‘‘My Girl: A Case Study’’’
Broadcast on SALTO 1 – Public Broadcasting Amsterdam
22 April, 29 April, 6 May 2012 9.20am, 9.50am, 1.20pm, 2.35pm

An imaginative conversation between Anne Frank and Sigmund Freud, a young girl and an old man or the artist and her father? 

My Girl: A Case Study is a hand-drawn animation, in which the two main characters are modelled frame by frame after performance footage. The background faces recall the physical features of Anne Frank and Sigmund Freud, but become aesthetic hybrids with those of the performers. The sound is a collage of pieces of an improvised conversation between the artist and her father surrounding the hypothetical scenario of Alice in Wonderland, with the protagonist getting abducted by aliens and undergoing a sexual transformation. Trauma, sexuality, perversion and transformation are key elements in this (extremely) dark, humorous scenario.    

Images: My Girl: A Case Study, Animation Still from Erase-Redraw Graphite Animation, 2mins 14seconds, 2009, photos by Nathalie Hartjes

More about NATHANIA RUBIN

“I work primarily in hand-drawn animation creating moments and characters that are a fictionally filtrated interpretations and expressions of an inter-subjective space. My work combines intimacy with morbidity and humour. It is concerned with the formulation and knowledge of the self’s dependence upon a relation to the other. I see fiction as an element in this relation. Stories and shared knowledge act as orbit points to which we orient ourselves from within our own subjectivities and thereby stand in certain proximity and orientation to the subjectivity of others. The work probes notions of iconography, fiction in reality, inter-subjectivity and female sexuality.“

Nathania Rubin (1978, USA) lives and works in Maastricht. She is currently a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and she holds a BA from Haverford College, Pennsylvania and an MFA fromat Queens College CUNY, New York. Recent exhibitions include the solo show Crowded, Webster Leiden Art Gallery, Leiden, the Netherlands (2012); It's the Political Economy Stupid, Austrian Cultural Forum, New York, USA (2012); A Corps Perdu, The Bourgogne Regional Council and FRAC Bourgogne, Chateauneuf-en-Auxois, France (2011); What a Drawing, Wild West Gallery, Maastricht, the Netherlands (2011); CologneOFF Film Series, National Center for Contemporary Art, St. Petersburg, Russia (2011); A Light at the End of the Tunnel, SCOPE Basel Cinema Program with Perpetual Art Machine, Basel, Switzerland (2010); the solo-show Dreaming Anne, Mireille Mosler Ltd, New York, USA (2009); Surveillance from the Dollhouse, Mireille Mosler Ltd, New York, USA (2009).

www.nathaniarubin.com