Emile Rubino

Working through the semantics of picture-making, Emile Rubino plays with the clumsy and often ambiguous nature of photography’s declarative register. By combining, appropriating or reinterpreting a wide range of photographic discourses and histories, he directs our attention towards the photographic image as both an object and a depiction—a thin yet capacious container whose material, contextual and ideological relationship to labor and creativity is a constant negotiation. His purposefully eclectic and at times collaborative approach to picture-making involves a mix of analogue and digital processes in an attempt to question the notion of ‘the photographic’ and address the complex relationship between the social roles of art and realism..