Joshua Rubin reception

media release: Not Gone Yet - Finding the Forgotten and Abandoned

December 12, 2025 - February 8, 2026

Opening Reception: December 12th, 6-8pm (free to attend)

Hours: Noon-6 pm Thu. & Sat., 2-8 pm Fri., noon-4 pm Sun.

Joshua Rubin is a photographer based in Madison. Raised in a creative household, he developed an early appreciation for curiosity and discovery, values that continue to shape his work today. Since picking up the camera in 2004, sparked by a summer camp intensive and a scout merit badge, Josh has embraced photography as both a craft and a form of personal challenge. From photo-a-day projects to color and theme-based experiments, he constantly pushes himself to see differently. He has become an active member of the Madison photography community by organizing and participating in the "Madison Photography Meetup Group". Since 2021, he has dove head first into rediscovering a passion for analogue photography. Drawn by its slower, more intentional rhythm, he embraced film as a way to reconnect with the tactile roots of photography. While film is his current obsession, he stands by the Chase Jarvis mantra: “The best camera is the one that’s with you.” Since the start of 2023, he has focused in on the theme of Midwest Gothic, a visual exploration of liminality, forgotten spaces, and the quiet tension between memory and abandonment. Through this lens, he seeks out the beauty in decay, documenting the things that have nearly been lost.

Not Gone Yet is an invitation to notice. To remember. To feel the presence of absence—and to consider what it means to endure, even as the world moves on. The Midwest is a land of vast skies and quiet absences—a region where the remnants of lives once lived echo across empty fields and dusty storefronts. It’s a place where the unusual, the forgotten, and the quietly unsettling exist in plain sight, half-buried in the everyday. Here, loneliness settles quietly, like dust on a windowpane—not born of isolation, but of life lived in the space between relevance and abandonment. This tension reveals itself in collapsing farmsteads made obsolete by industrial consolidation, in storefronts where sun-faded inventory still waits behind dust-covered glass, and in the fading footprints of towns whose names no longer appear on maps. These places are not fully gone, but not fully present either—caught in a liminal state between past and present, use and neglect, memory and erasure. Through this collection of black-and-white film photography, this exhibition invites viewers to pause and look closer. To notice what we often overlook. To remember the fragments of a shared past that still lingers, haunting the edges of the familiar. These images don’t just document decay—they hold space for it, asking what it means to exist on the verge of being forgotten.

Learn more about Joshua HERE