Emile Rubino
Baby, I'm Yours

22.10 – 10.12

KIOSK travels to rhizome_ in Kortrijk for Emile Rubino's solo exhibition Baby, I'm Yours.

Exhibition text

For nearly six years I worked in an art gallery. I think I loved my job. It wasn’t my first gallery job but it was the first one that involved getting paid to work. It was my first ‘real job’ after grad school. I became a full-time employee. I stabilized my legal and financial situation in a new country. It was a good job. It was a good gallery. I had a desk with a Vitra EA 108 aluminum chair. Coffee was good. The pay wasn’t so good. I often complained about aspects of my job to close friends the same way I would complain about an ungrateful or distracted lover. Days were long. I had supportive colleagues who saw me through hard times. I was often late. But I regularly worked unpaid overtime, and I was very flexible. The partners I dated during these years all told me that my most conservative trait is my people pleasing-personality. I am working on it. Saying no isn’t easy when you are an employee. After years of saying yes to lifting, pulling and pushing, my back began to hurt and I began to feel resentment. I had to find a way to recapture time. Through minuscule deviations in my working day, the gallery became my studio. I made photocopies of objects from the backroom. I hand-colored them during long phone calls. My gaze strayed when I used the gallery’s camera. And I began to document the conditions around the artworks I was documenting. For this work, the conditions of production were located in the gallery only to the extent that, at the time, my life was the gallery.

About Emile Rubino

Emile Rubino (b.1992) lives and works in Brussels. He holds an MFA from ICP-Bard College, New York (2017), and a BFA from Emily Carr University, Vancouver (2015). Solo exhibitions include: Bon public, Cc Strombeek, Grimbergen (2022), LANDLINE (with Konrad Klapheck), Situations, New York (2021); Friends & Laundry, Island, Brussels (2018). Recent group exhibitions include: Destinées, Air de Paris, Romainville (2023), à contretemps, LambdaLambdaLambda, Pristina (2023); L’Angoisse Dominicale, Treize, Paris (2022); .tiff, FOMU, Antwerp (2022); Saint-Gilles Confidential, LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS, Brussels (2021); Ami Omo, Barbara Walters Gallery, Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY (2018). Rubino co-edits Le Chauffage magazine, an artist-run publication based between Brussels and Vancouver. His writing regularly appears in frieze, CFA, and Text zur Kunst.