Rust

It’s happening all the time, all around us. We cover it up. We ignore it. Rust takes on the many meanings of this oxidized substance, showing how technology bleeds into biology and ecology. Jean-Michel Rabaté combines art, science, and autobiography to share his fascination with peeling paints and rusty metal sheets. Rust, he concludes, is a place where things living, built, and remembered commingle.

“This is a witty, delightfully eclectic fantasy and fugue on the theme of rust, which, it turns out, is a perfect metaphor for an aesthetics of metamorphosis in and after modernism. Rust has the ruddy glow of active thinking in the process of self-transformation. Rust not only doesn’t sleep, it never stops giving off sparks.” – Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania

“Through his elegant alchemical associations, Rabaté spins Rust to gold.” – Vanessa Place, artist and criminal defense attorney