Joshua Rabineau

Lives and works in New Haven, CT, USA

Artist statement

Through a diverse range of materials and fabrication processes, I seek to blur the lines between opposing physical and psychological dualities. I strive to anthropomorphize, animate, and re-contexualize familiar objects and corporeal forms, primarily drawing from aesthetics of childhood, fantasy, decorative arts, beauty, propaganda, queer culture, and mythology. I consistently return to depictions of innocence and purity as starting points for subversive play. Increasingly inspired by child psychoanalysis, specifically the theories of Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicott, I invoke the aesthetics of adolescence in an attempt to conjure a specific time of innocence, whimsy, and the unknown, a time of inner and outer world-building but also a time of world-learning, indoctrination, and socialization, of awe and magic, but also of terror and anxiety. I aim to conjure simultaneous resonance and repulsion: complicating cultural and social norms through uncanny embodiment and disembodiment at both the micro and macro scale. I am interested in evoking sensorial and psychological experiences of the body that oscillate while circumnavigating, peering in, or pondering my work. I am not solely mediating on the current adult body I inhabit but the previous stages and scales of bodies we adults all have traversed through from infancy to adolescence to pre-pubescent and everything in between and beyond, even forms of bodies longed for, unrealized, unresolved, repressed or even oppressed....

Artwork