At first glance, Friends of Pluto (2026) may appear to defy laws of physics. Yet its means of arresting such an energetic explosion mid-air are founded in universal structures familiar to the natural world. Rubins’s sculptures adapt cabling systems developed by Kenneth Snelson, who modeled the structural principle of “tensegrity,” a resilient system of tension and compression that allows for precarious arrangements of objects to cantilever, attenuate, and careen into space. In Friends of Pluto, members of compression are not geometric rods, but aluminum boats. When held in mass by the tension of the wire, the vessels shed their utilitarian implications and edge toward abstraction. The familiar objects take on new lives as wild strokes of varying weights, shapes, and color. The form develops a voluptuous and at times a delicate anatomy. Rubins first introduced boats as a medium in 2006 with Pleasure Point and Big Pleasure Point, the former installation bursting from the roof of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the latter which towered over the plaza of New York City’s Lincoln Center. They’ve since appeared as permanent fixtures across the globe, including as a “monochrome” series in Buffalo, Austin, and Paris; the most recent, Winnie’s Pleasure (2024), adds its bright colored forms to an urban residential community in Burnaby, British Columbia.

Marking twenty years of the ongoing series, Friends of Pluto’s heft and muscularity finds an appropriate home in Montauk. The Ranch is a twenty-six-acre property that, in addition to hosting ambitious exhibitions of contemporary artists since 2020, continues to operate as a training center for competition-grade cutting horses. Once the United States’ longest-running cattle farm, the property’s rolling pastures saw frequent visits from its neighbors Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey in the 1970s as Montauk’s remote, untamed landscapes called to artists looking to escape Manhattan. While the new artwork reminisces boats from the adjacent lakes, bays, and Atlantic Ocean in the hamlet famous for its fishing industry, it’s the sum-total strength of the sculpture’s parts that resonates the most with Montauk’s nickname as “The End.” Embracing the winds from the sea from its outdoor position, Friends of Pluto takes on the gravitas of its locale. Its vantage grants it with a fitting sense of infinity.

Text by Kate Meadows (June 2026)