Joint art exhibit for Osolin, Rubino at the LPCA
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What: Gallery opening and Meet-the-Artist Reception for visual artists Anastasia Osolin and Carl Rubino
Where: Lake Placid Center for the Arts, 17 Algonquin Ave.
When: 5 to 7 p.m. Friday and the gallery will be on display through Feb. 5, Wednesdays through Saturdays from 1 to 5 p.m.
How much: Free
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LAKE PLACID — The Lake Placid Center for the Arts will host an art show featuring local visual artists Anastasia Osolin and Carl Rubino.
Osolin works primarily in found-object art and will display works such as boxed assemblages, collages and framed digital prints of collages, she said. She is a bookbinder and a yoga instructor living in Saranac Lake.
“I collect from the yard sales and flea markets, trash dumps and antique stores,” she said. “Or some stuff I just literally find on the ground when I’m walking or people give me things, and I just like to put it together.”
She said her process changes, depending on whether she is guided by her ideas or the objects she has found.
“It sort of varies. Sometimes I start out with an idea of something that I want to do. Other times it’s sort of more abstract, just because I like the way things look together. I rarely start out with an idea of what I want to do and then end up with something that looks like I imagined it. It very much evolves as it goes.”
Osolin started her career in art by attending the School of Visual Arts and graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in illustration but became interested in found-object art as she learned the history of the style and always held on to pieces of things she found interesting.
“I’ve always collected weird, little interesting bits of stuff,” she said. “I guess at some point I felt like I needed to do something with all this stuff or else there is no reason to justify keeping it. Part of the reason I make it into art is so I don’t drown in it.”
“I look at what to other people is literally garbage, and see something interesting and beautiful.”
Rubino, who lives in Lake Placid, is a fine art photographer and will show a collection of photographs that capture small sections of sailboat hulls kept in outdoor winter storage that have been exposed to the elements.
Rubino was taking a ferry from Charlotte, Vermont to Essex, New York, when he had some free time to mull around a boat yard.
“Because of the nature of the paint on the boat, the portion of the boat hull that’s underwater deteriorates a lot in the winter elements because the paint is designed not to adhere fast to the surface like your house paint would but to be able to give so that barnacles and weedy things can’t adhere. So when this paint sits out there in the winter it runs, it blisters, it peels, it does all sorts of things.
“As I looked at them I would sometimes just see patterns, textures, layers, colors and shapes that would appeal to me and not consciously suggest anything to me. And then sometimes I would see things that looked almost like landscapes or horizon lines or whatever they might be.”
Rubino said he has had a long history with boats sailing since he was young and took hundreds of digital photos in the boat yard with the majority being full frame.
He said the art becomes truly multidimensional when it can be viewed through several different layers.
“One of the beauties to abstract photography is that it is almost like a triad, I may see one thing when I shoot it, then when I bring it into the computer I may have a completely different reaction, and then when I print it and put it on the wall another person may feel or see something completely different than what I did. I think that’s really exciting.”
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(Editor’s note: Minor errors in wording and punctuation in this article have been corrected.)