Biography:
Annette Rusin is a visual artist located in DUMBO, Brooklyn a neighborhood between the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges. She specializes in layering ephemeral, translucent materials to created luminous, tactile surfaces and environments. Her mediums are sculpture, installation, and works on paper - particularly vellum which is a translucent paper.
She began her career in the arts at Rhode Island School of Design where she recieved a Bachelor of Architecture and spent a year studying architecture in Rome. After RISD, she relocated to Philadelphia to work for Robert Venturi. Rusin spent approximately 6 years working for various architectural firms, notably James Stewart Polshek in New York City.
As a young architect, Rusin discovered the small transfer drawings of Paul Klee and became fascinated by the irregular, fibrous line that resulted from his process. This, combined with her love of drawing and drafting, inspired her to refocus on her work as a visual artist. "As strange as it might seem, that line and how it was made has formed the basis for a large part of my career as an artist. It's an element that I repeatedly return to in my artwork," she says. After obtaining her MFA in painting at Hunter College in New York City, Rusin went on to develop a hybrid pintmaking/transfer drawing technique on vellum paper that earned her residencies at MacDowell and Millay, among other prizes, grants, and awards.
Annette Rusin
has exhibited nationally and had her work acquired by private and corporate collections. In 2007, her work was selected by Project DUMBO and purchased by Hudson Properties, Inc. for J Condominium. Selections from her vellum work made their debut in November 2008 as the Horizon Series featured in the Designer's Studio at Warp & Weft in New York City and Washington, DC. She was just awarded a 2009-2010 A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and had work on view in the A.I.R. Gallery Biennial curated by Lilly Wei in March 2009. She has been invited to exhibit twenty works on paper from her Cosmetic Dreams Series at the International Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in Incheon, Korea taking place August 1-31, 2009.
Over the past two years, Annette Rusin has been expanding her artistic practice to include sculpture, installation and non-traditional methods of drawing. She has been using unorthodox drawing tools and manipulating wall surface layers to explore ritual, vanity and conformity in the man-made, ready-made world.
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