08/29/2026
Rebekah Rubalcava’s ɐʌɐɔlɐqnɹ ɥɐʞǝqǝɹ paintings inhabit the charged territory between religious symbolism, sexuality, and feminine experience, where inherited systems of belief are continuously reimagined through lived experience.
If Kenneth Anger transforms reality through montage and transubstantiation, Catherine Corman through the historical apparatus of the camera, Emma Gray through image persistence and temporal layering, and Jon Pylypchuk through the accumulating patina of lived time, Rubalcava works through signification. She takes images that already carry histories, the n**e, the serpent, fruit, devotion, temptation, the feminine body, and allows them to pass through the particularities of her own experience.
The familiar begins to feel strange. A symbol from religious painting becomes entangled with sexuality; the body becomes both subject and site of judgment; desire and devotion begin to occupy the same space. Her figures seem suspended between dream and reality, often carrying the theatricality of a film still while remaining rooted in the inherited language of painting.
Here, the mechanism of transmutation is meaning itself. Rubalcava takes what has already been signified and gives it another life through memory, desire, mythology, and the feminine experience today. The symbol survives, and it no longer belongs entirely to its history.
– Saul Appelbaum Saul Appelbaum
Photography Yubo D**g Yubo - ofstudio photography
