Josh Rabineau: Tender Split
Josh Rabineau’s individual presentation Tender Split takes its name from Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theory of “splitting,” defined as a defensive maneuver used in the early stages of childhood development to manage overwhelming emotions and anxieties by dividing the world into binary opposites.1 In essence, by separating external relationships and experiences into black and white thinking, we are protected from gray areas.
Rabineau came to his interest in Child psychoanalysis as a result of consistent play with idealized representations of innocence, drawing from decorative arts, fairy tales, beauty, mythology, propaganda, and childhood. By invoking their aesthetics, he attempts 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, a stage in life where our understanding of normativity was still inherently porous. Through a diverse range of materials and fabrication processes, he collapses opposing physical and psychological dualities, transmuting, transmogrifying, and obscuring them until they become unrecognizable.
Silicone mimics flesh. Flesh mimics metal. Each object appears to relate to the other on a medium-specific level first; long flowing locks reappear as braided steel, no longer a part of a body but a coat of arms; peepholes into private bed chambers of a dollhouse give way to the fleshy exterior of a colonial home; bubblegum on closer inspection looks like some externalized membrane. The exchange of material and use throughout creates a body outside of all of the ones inhabiting the space—different parts sutured together here and there, asking to be investigated but giving away very little.
Rabineau reveals parts of the anthropomorphic figures while holding them in a constant state of being unknowable. Approaching Pretty & Petrified (2024), as if by some mythological circumstance, a deer appears to be gilded in sidewalk cellar doors. Upon closer inspection, the shell is epoxy clay painted with spray chrome, and a plastic cellar door leaks light from another dimension. A single freed hoof suggests the deer could be pushing its way out or resisting an external force trying to take it apart. This partial vision suspends the deer between protected or captured, defenseless or armored.2
Facing away in shame or defensiveness, home body (2025) is bound up with splitting3. Its blonde synthetic hair parted down the back, as if in wait for a doctor’s assessment, reveals colonial-style shingles forming a scale armor. Hung slightly above eye level, the severed torso demands that we raise our eyes to it ever so slightly, revealing synthetic moss and flowers, as if uprooted suddenly from a cul-de-sac of home bodies more common than our own brick-and-mortar. You are the one who’s off.
Manifesting simultaneous experiences of visceral resonance and repulsion, Rabineau complicates cultural and social norms through uncanny embodiment and disembodiment. Glistening with some form of artificial sweat, Welcome to the Peep Show (2024) stretches forth like a Sphinx animated into heat, its arched posterior demanding a long-awaited visitor. Both triumphant and abject, the figure holds its head high while the audience is forced to stoop to the gallery floor, grasp its dirty socks or buttocks for balance, and press their face into its rear. On first glance, we see a dollhouse, specifically a Victorian bedchamber. The peeling wallpaper would suggest it’s abandoned, but a faint light can be seen through the sagging floorboards, hinting not only to other restricted chambers and bodily cavities, but to a renovation in progress.
Continuing to play with aesthetics of augmentation, Nipples Are the Windows to the Soul (2025) flaunts its newly “rejuvenated” body. The right arm, outstretched and coaxing, is shorter and less developed than the more “brolic” left. However, this musculature is pointedly for display—as a manicured claw foot confidently and uselessly rests on its hip. In a synthesis of metal and flesh, the gilded deer returns atop the severed torso like a mounted hunting trophy, while what appears to be surgically implanted peepholes offer to once again display an “opened” body.4 Entered through the heart (left nipple), a Victorian bedchamber appears pristine and unused, almost like a showroom in progress—not even a mattress has yet to be set upon the bed. Moving from façade to scaffolding, the next nipple (right side of the figure’s chest), reveals the true “innards” of the sculpture—the material in the raw, and the armature beyond in the horizon. As if halfway through getting into character, a prosthetically yassified self-portrait of the artist seems to rush to the peephole to see who’s there. Rabineau places himself, the body, and the spectator in a triangle of voyeurs pointing at one another—we are all caught with our pants down. Each partial view shifts the perspective like a film cutting multiple points of view successively, ending in the lower abdomen. An exterior “shot” of a colonial home and a synthetic grass lawn appears as pristine as the bedroom, with the exception of one damaged window, pointing to us as the likely trespasser. Though we are offered points of entry, we have no clearance to pass through.
We are asked to meet the works at their own “level,” to encumber ourselves to their will in hopes of getting to know them. Transmuted from its original to antithetical material context, epoxy and plastic imitate metal, while metal imitates hair. The “opened” bodies are more concerned with a constant state of physical and psychological foreplay—we never penetrate, instead kneeling or standing up to tenderly gaze into the eyes… or other regions.5
Binding dualities of child/adult, innocent/evil, human/animal, animate/inanimate, beautiful/grotesque, femme/masc, industrial/organic, embodied/disembodied, Tender Split leaves us both comforted and disturbed, frightened and tickled pink.
— Betty McGhee, Miami Beach, May 2025
Josh Rabineau (b. 1997, Los Angeles, CA) is currently pursuing an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University, New Haven, CT (expected 2026). Rabineau earned his BA in Studio Art and Integrative Design at Wesleyan University, Middletown CT (2020).
[1] Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States” (1940), in The Selected Melanie Klein, 148–149; and Melanie Klein, “The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego” (1930), The Selected Melanie Klein, 97–98; referenced in Mignon Nixon, Fantastic Reality: Louise Bourgeois and a Story of Modern Art (Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2005), 183.
"She [Klein] describes the infant’s primitive ego as attempting to ‘build up’ a relation to the outside world, beginning with the mother’s body. Finding itself surrounded with objects of anxiety, such as the mother’s breast and its own excrement, the ego begins to make sense of its environment through the body; in effect, it produces itself by building up a world to which it can—in time, symbolically—relate."
[2] Isabel Cristina Pinedo, Recreational Terror: Women and the Pleasures of Horror Film Viewing (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 51. "But the act of showing the ruined body is only half the story; the other half is the act of concealing, of producing a partial vision."
[3] “bound up with splitting, with falling into bits.” Klein to Marion Milner, letter, 24 February 1953, published in Marion Milner, The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis, New Library of Psychoanalysis 3 (London: Routledge, 1987), 109–110; quoted in Nixon, Fantastic Reality, 201–204.
[4] Carol Clover, Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 32; referenced by Pinedo, The Pleasure of Seeing, 61.
Pinedo elaborates on Carol Clover’s term, the "opened" body, as exposing "what is normally concealed or encased to reveal the hidden recesses of the body, porn through carnal knowledge and horror through carnage."
[5] Ibid. "The narratives of both genres, sometimes thin, sometimes dense, surround spectacles of the penetration or devouring of a body." While Pinedo and Clover’s assessment of the opened body’s aesthetic utility is to be penetrated or devoured in a final act, Rabineau suggests a more tender and prolonged foreplay.
