Nancy Rubins: Our Friend Fluid Metal

Throughout her career, Nancy Rubins has amassed found everyday objects—mobile trailers, canoes, airplane parts, and playground equipment—into monumental sculptures. Her enormous, powerful assemblages, secured together with thin steel trusses and tension cables, explode into space and appear to defy gravity.

In her series Our Friend Fluid Metal, Rubins transforms children’s equipment from playgrounds, amusement parks, and coin-operated rides into dynamic, colorful sculptures that uncannily cantilever and bloom out of the ground. Weathered from use, this equipment was originally produced with metal recycled from World War II aircraft, and Rubins’s careful aggregations of these cast-off objects give them a new life.

“What I love about [them],” Rubins says, “is that they’ve had so much use. The initial use of what it was before it was these objects, and then thousands of children who jumped on these things and wore them down, and they’ve been painted and repainted again. They had their own life way before I ever got them.”

Two works from this series are presented in Chicago for the first time in an installation composed by the artist for the Bluhm Family Terrace.