The sculpture Chas’ Stainless Steel, Mark Thompson’s Airplane Parts, About 1,000 Pounds of Stainless Steel Wire, and Gagosian’s Beverly Hills Space at MOCA encapsulates Nancy Rubins’s longstanding, complex, and fearless approach to working with diverse materials at larger-than-life scales. Having received her master’s degree from the University of California, Davis, in the early 1980s, Rubins settled in Los Angeles, where she began to work with discarded, found, and thrifted materials. Over time, her works grew in size, density, and intricacy, evidencing her interest both in formal process and in properties of balance and structure.

Rubins’s engineering proficiency is evident in Chas’ Stainless Steel, which is a dynamic amalgamation of variously sized scrapped airplane parts and cables; elevated from the ground they shoot out from a stainless steel base into the air, expanding like the branches of a tree. It is a work that seems to defy gravity, its twisted and dismembered elements at once awe-inspiring and suggestive of wreckage and ruin. Originally presented at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles in 2001, it was disassembled and reconfigured for MOCA’s Grand Avenue location in 2002. In 2019, it moved to its current location outside of The Geffen Contemporary in Little Tokyo.