Too Much | Madison Rubenstein

The work Rubenstein has curated includes new paintings never before shown to the public and works from 2021-2022. The selection of paintings explore disability, trauma, epigenetics and their personal ancestral lineage. Most people who are neurocomplex or who are disabled have experienced being called “too much.” We worry we are “too much” for our loved ones, or experience life believing that we feel and want “too much.” Rubenstein explores how these experiences also intersect with their Jewish lineage and being socialized female, and how this makes their experience of the world feel more complex. In their new paintings, Rubenstein depicts a chaotic emotional and psychological landscape by referencing contorted, distorted, abstracted, and repeated renderings of their own physical body. Many of the figures are rendered fragmented, fractured, ghost-like, and unfinished, or are reduced to lumpy flesh-like blobs. Rubenstein brings in intensely-saturated and serotonin-promoting colors to shift the narrative of these lived-experiences and to view them from a spiritual lens. The act of incorporating joy and pleasure into the paintings through the use of playful texture and vibrant color feels like a necessary act in the process of rejecting the concept of being “too much” and instead embracing the complexities, unknowns, and spiritual experience that take place within and beyond our physical bodies.