ART CITIES:N.York-Alex Hubbard

Alex Hubbard’s work encompasses video art and painting, exploring the boundaries of each via a cross-examination that invigorates both media in new and inventive ways. Constructed along parallel lines, his videos and paintings explore composition, mass, color and depth of images in unexpected ways. In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard’s paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of color in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Working with fast-drying materials, such as epoxy and latex, the artist is forced to act quickly, embracing chance happenings and revelling in the autonomy of his chosen media.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Eva Presenhuber Gallery Archive

Alex Hubbard in his silo exhibition “In the Near Field” presents paintings and video projectors. Contrary to what you might believe, the chief concern in Hubbard’s practice is not painting, its possibilities, and its history; nor is it, as in his videos, the production of comedy glittered with despair. Rather, it is technology, the scientific method, and trying to navigate the wreckage of Modernist reason and logic. Hubbard’s paintings are material wonders, describing and inscribing the complex processes that eventuate into them as final forms—the mixing and manipulating of various semi-industrial products like resin, urethane, latex, and fiberglass, and the application of semi-industrial processes like UV printing and, in his recent works, the layering of transparent sheets cast from the works topographies’ themselves. In the very latest paintings, Hubbard has turned to applying oil paint atop all this, but that move makes him no less a chemist compared to the typical wielder of sable-tipped brushes.  In his videos, meanwhile, technology is baldly misused. His earlier video works often feature him in the role of scientist-conductor—wearing the occasional lab coat or hazmat suit—of abstruse methodologies and the operation of hysterically jury-rigged contraptions moving toward a punctuating event. In more recent years, his video effects become the protagonists of screwball comedies, flaunting the seams of the work rather than concealing them in favor of the ultra-smooth façade they were designed to create. In the pre-Enlightenment old days, of course, art and science were not so distinct from one another, and magic not entirely out of the mix. As the old talking point goes, techne, the ancestor of our technology, meant “art.” Art in this sense was any practice that manifests knowledge for use; thus, it could unite science and c/raft. What renders Hubbard’s elevated tinkering as bastard empiricism is an unexpected resuscitation of the humanist-scientist impulse—timely for a present well past the use-by date of the Modern era but well before any coherence has settled on what lingers and grows after it. Hubbard’s newest venture, begun in 2019, is a series of homemade video projectors. Instead of a vivid procedural relic or a dramedy about the haphazard nature of trial and error, the endpoint is a teetering, audibly whirring caterpillar of black boxes casting a hazed moving image into the dark.

Info: Eva Presenhuber Gallery, 39 Great Jones Street, New York, Duration: 16/4-29/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.presenhuber.com