Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Tammie Rubin: Press Hold On The Hand: San Antonio

Ruiz-Healy Art is delighted to present person Press Hold On The Hand, featuring the works of artists Jennifer Ling Datchuk and Tammie Rubin. The exhibition opens on Wednesday, November 29th, with a reception from 6:00-8:00 PM. Jennifer Ling Datchuk & Tammie Rubin: Press Hold On The Hand will be on view at our San Antonio gallery through January 6, 2024. Datchuk and Rubin share a language and depth of materials rooted in domesticity, migrations, and hope. Press Hold On The Hand looks at our collective and cumulative grief, personally and globally, and asks viewers to pause, reflect, and take stock of the signs and affirmations that keep us moving forward. Datchuk presents a series of sculptures using materials such as porcelain, wire, and human hair that decorate the walls with their ornamentation. Using intricate motifs, Rubin’s work delves into themes involving ritual, domestic, and liturgical objects.

Jennifer Ling Datchuk's work is shaped by her cultural heritage, and the labor of communities in the US and abroad. Datchuk works with porcelain and materials often associated with traditional women’s work—such as textiles and hair fibers. Datchuk’s practice discusses fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and her personal history. Through material culture, the history of craft, and by championing the handmade, Datchuk challenges the social, political, and cultural systems that continue to hold women back.Commonly found in Asian homes and gathering spaces, objects such as welcome mats, bamboo scratchers, and hair link together ideas of work, time, desire and consumption. 

"Double Pleasure and Double Trouble are inspired by bamboo back scratchers found in many Asian households, these simple bamboo forms help you relieve an out of reach itch. I think about this form as a metaphor for the invisible labor many communities of color perform in service of others. I come from a long line of service industry Asians. They sewed and altered clothing, gutted fish, waited tables, cooked food, and watched and raised other people's children. They often went without the comfort and care they provided for others. Double Pleasure holds two fruits significant to Chinese symbolism - peaches as a symbol of longevity and oranges as a symbol of good fortune. They are juicy and ripe with hope." - Jennifer Ling Datchuk

“I extract images, symbols, and maps to create visual codes that speak of Black American citizenry. I construct my prayer fans by mining mundane family photos; moments of joy, contemplation, autonomy, and domesticity. I then mine archives for images of American political cultural happenings, milestones, and policies that impact or interpret the original perceived narrative. The transparent compositions are then applied to laser cut masonite fans. The brown of the masonite acts as skin. I experiment with countering the deletion of Black Americans from narratives of Americana while playing with image deconstruction. The works display acts of faithfulness to “American Life,” despite the realities of negotiating a maze of institutional discriminatory practices such as redlining, economic isolation, and political and social inequality. The fans are memorials of Black American Citizenry.” - Tammie Rubin

Image-dissolving abstractions certainly demonstrate the push-pull in Rubin’s works, but her ceramic sculptures remain the most striking example of their laden open interpretation. In her ongoing series Unknown Ritual Masks, Rubin uses a variety of objects — funnels, traffic cones — to create conical pieces from slip cast porcelain. Some are adorned with trinkets, others map textures and patterns, a few even have mouths. Smiles, in fact. Yet they all have holes for eyes, and those eyes stare out from a bottomless void.

 Rubin's Always & Forever (forever, ever) Series are porcelain casts of recognizable consumer forms that reference hoods, headdresses, hats, and helmets. From Catholic Brothers of the Nazarene hoods, dunce caps, wizard hats, Ku Klux Klan hoods to African ceremonial masks, helmets, and the cone-wearing figures in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, these intimate ensembles imbue familiarity, uncertainty, and foreboding.