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Email PageAlex Hubbard 2008
January 17, 2008- February 16, 2008
Reception: January 17, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Alex Hubbard
Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery
526 W 26th St Alex Hubbard Still from video |
Hubbard's videos begin with private videotaped performances that are shot in a single take from above, so that what occurs is fixed to a plane as a pseudo-2-D composition. After a flurry of activity and extensive editing, what remains is Buster Keaton on a tabletop. The actions become a locomotive tableau of vaudevillian tropes, pre-CGI visual effects, legerdemain, and blunt manipulations of hapless objects. Joanna Fiduccia writes, "Like Roman Signer, Hubbard stages calculated destruction; but whereas Signer's savor is in the suspense, Hubbard's films are a decoupage of movement, a surfeit of pure, absurd doing."
Gliding through references to such disparate genres as TV cooking shows, card games, magic tricks, performance art, and house parties, the videos operate according to their own unique logic. Each occurrence directs the next, which in turn nullifies the previous act and takes us to the next beginning. The sound in these works mixes together diegetic noise and postproduction effects, a combination that simultaneously reinforces the works' performative aspect and unhinges the “reality” of what unfolds onscreen.
The paintings featured in the exhibition likewise result from the layering of action, taking cues from digital editing as well as tearing, cutting, pasting, and pouring. They orbit around the video works, spiraling outward into playful abstraction but returning to the direct physicality of collage.
Alex Hubbard received his B.F.A from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 1999, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program from 2002 to 2003. He has had a solo exhibition at Castillo/Corrales, Paris, and presented work in group exhibitions at institutions including the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; and the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Art Reviews of Alex Hubbard 2008
| New York Times February 1, 2008 | Roberta Smith | "That art mediums come and go but aesthetic dualities never die is proved once more by the formalist-Expressionist opposition in the shows of Meiro Koizumi and Alex Hubbard, performance-based video artists. It is the New York debut for Mr. Koizumi, a Japanese artist who studied in Amsterdam and lived in London before recently relocating to Tokyo. Mr. Hubbard, a New York artist, is having an amusing if rather lackadaisical Chelsea debut following his first solo show, at Reena Spaulings on the Lower East Side in 2004...." |
Books and DVDs related to artists in this show
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