Image-dissolving abstractions certainly demonstrate the push-pull in Rubin’s works, but her ceramic sculptures remain the most striking example of their laden open interpretation. In an ongoing series prominently featured in the exhibition, Rubin uses a variety of objects — funnels, traffic cones — to create conical pieces from slip cast porcelain. Some are adorned with trinkets, others map textures and patterns, a few even have mouths. Smiles, in fact. Yet they all have holes for eyes, and those eyes stare out from a bottomless void.

In Rubin’s Always & Forever (forever, ever) Series, her sculptures are conical groupings of power, fraternity, anonymity, pageantry, and belief. Rubin’s sculptures are porcelain casts of recognizable consumer forms that reference hoods, headdresses, hats, and helmets. From Catholic Brothers of the Nazarene hoods, dunce caps, wizard hats, Ku Klux Klan hoods to African ceremonial masks, helmets, and the cone-wearing figures in Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, these intimate ensembles imbue familiarity, uncertainty, and foreboding. Sculptures are intricately drawn, detailed, and layered using pigmented casting slips and underglazes. The surfaces denote maps, routes, and statistical data that are acts of autonomous movement, escape, and engineered containment of Black Americans.