3/14/26 - 5/23/26
Through her exhibition Noncompliant, Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio challenges the notion of time and its relationship to our lived reality, exposing time as a social construct and examining the incompatibility of this construct with human bodies, disability, and illness. The term “noncompliant,” often used in educational or medical settings, is charged with judgment and fear, which deems someone’s behavior as disobedient and undesirable, implying that one is working against constructed social expectations or systems of power. Ortiz-Rubio’s exhibition works to reclaim this term, highlighting its inherent ableism and reasserting noncompliance as a human right for all. Her work explores the notion of crip time, a concept derived from disabled experience that addresses a non-linear relationship to time, working to bend the clock to meet disabled bodies, rather than the other way around. Ortiz-Rubio draws from deeply personal experience, exploring illness, memory, disability, and access through watercolors, graphite drawings, and a multi-media installation. She plays between the minute and the infinite, representing the moment of connection between two atoms magnified into a large-scale charcoal mural, composed of undulating cloudy shapes and expressive lines of charcoal. Ortiz-Rubio’s work acts as a witness to events in her life in which time has been questioned, lost, broken, and redefined, rendered in exacting details down to the smallest neuron. Her questioning of time invites us to open our minds to the possibility of time working for us rather than against us, challenging modern notions of productivity and control. The implications of Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio’s work reverberate beyond the gallery walls into our communities, asking us to reconsider what it means to make accessibility truly for everyone, aligning access for all with liberation for all.
Tatiana Ortiz-Rubio is a multi-disciplinary artist from Mexico whose work includes painting, drawing, murals, and installations. She received her MFA from the New York Academy of Art and her BA in Art History and Visual Arts from the University of San Diego. Ortiz-Rubio has exhibited her artwork internationally in both museums and galleries, and her work is part of major collections including the University of El Claustro de Sor Juana in Mexico City, the University of San Diego, the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library, and the City of San Diego Civic Art Collection. Her permanent public murals can be seen throughout the city of San Diego. In 2018 her work was selected for the inaugural Painting Biennial Maria Izquierdo at the Instituto Cultural Cabañas in Guadalajara, México. Recently, she was the 2024 Artist in Residence for the Timken Museum of Art and has been awarded the 2026 San Diego Art Prize. Her current work focuses on concepts of time, crip time, individual narrative, astro-physics, philosophy and memory. Ortiz-Rubio was a Bread & Salt IMPACT Artist in Residence in 2018, creating a mural spanning all four walls of the artist residency space entitled ‘y llega siempre.’ She currently teaches drawing at the University of San Diego.
