constructDEconstruct
Yvette Drury Dubinsky

GALLERY I

November 16 – December 15, 2024

Opening reception: Saturday, November 16, from 6–8pm

A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce constructDEconstruct, an exhibition of new mixed media installations by New York Artist Yvette Drury Dubinsky. 

constructDEconstruct explores the tenuousness of shelter, stability, and home. Born of the interplay between solitary workings in her studio, the push-pull of her personal life, and the ongoing turmoil of the outside world, Dubinsky’s new work combines maps and silhouetted figures with abstract shapes created by flattened boxes using painting, printmaking, alternative photography, and sculpture on paper and metal. This is Dubinsky’s fifth solo exhibition at A.I.R.

constructDEconstruct expands Dubinsky’s 2022 exhibition Searching For Peace, in which she repurposed small cardboard boxes used to store medicines and art supplies. The boxes were flattened, printed or painted on, and then framed, transformed into discrete two-dimensional objects. In constructDEconstruct Dubinsky pushes the boxes further, using them as printing plates, layering their shapes on paper to create complex monotypes. The resulting prints are brought together with the original boxes, which have been printed, painted, and collaged with oil-based ink, gesso, colored inks, photo processes, acrylic, pencil, and marker to create two large-scale, three-dimensional installations, as well as three smaller works.  

The boxes in Searching For Peace gestured toward their original use, as containers for supplies—medical and artistic—that sustain an individual life. But here, as they alchemize into sprawling assemblages, they begin to resemble buildings and intersecting realities. The linear, interlocking configuration in the first installation recalls a cityscape or perhaps a train car. The arrangement of the boxes and prints in the second installation is deliberately chaotic. Intermingling with hand-welded metal shapes, the boxes appear to randomly come off the wall, reflecting a landscape that might have been bombed or destroyed by natural disaster. Also printed on the boxes are maps from places such as Aleppo, New York, and Gaza, as well as silhouetted figures drawn from The New York Times and photographs of Dubinsky’s own family. 

In the first, linear, installation these figures travel, as if on a journey to someplace new. In the second assemblage, they survey the rubble, perhaps forced to flee homes now destroyed. The boxes, once literal containers for supplies, become metaphors for human refuge. Their forms reference current social problems: lack of affordable housing, the destruction of housing during wartime, and lack of shelter for migrants. The reuse of containers, meanwhile, seeks to reverse the accumulation of waste in our landfills, and by extension its effect on global warming.

A wide variety of support structures sustain us as humans: the houses we live in, the families we nurture, and the communities in which we stake claim. But these support structures are also vulnerable to illness and injury, or war and climate change. constructDEconstruct asks, “What do we do when our systems of support fail?”

Yvette Drury Dubinsky, based in Truro, MA; New York, NY; and St. Louis, MO, has been a New York member of A.I.R. Gallery for eleven years.  She earned her MFA from the Sam Fox School at Washington University, where she has also twice received distinguished alumni awards.  

 She has had recent solo exhibitions at Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis, MO; Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; and Farm Projects, Wellfleet, MA. Dubinsky’s work is in the collections of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, the Nevada Museum of Art Center for Art and the Environment, the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Margaret Harwell Art Museum, and has been part of the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Department of State. Dubinsky has been the recipient of a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, France. www.yddstudio.com.

View the Press Release here.

View Yvette Drury Dubinsky’s page here.

Photography: Matthew Sherman