ART-PREVIEW: Alex Hubbard-The Border, The Ship II
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. Avoiding a single point of focus, Hubbard constructs his videos in layers, engulfing the viewer with bold colors, performative gestures and evolving, all-over compositions in which movement is multi-directional and time appears to be non-linear.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galerie Eva Presenhuber Archive
Since the mid-2000s, Alex Hubbard has combined the compositional activity of a painter, a Foley artist’s ear for the texture of sound, and an idiosyncratic theater of everyday objects into a sui generis practice that tests the boundaries of painting, film, and performance against one another. Animated by a tension between medium-specificity and its loss, these works are presented as large-scale projections, often in aspect ratios more common to painting than cinema. In his latest video, “The Border, The Ship II” (2021), Hubbard continues a decade-long move away from the tabletops on which his strange choreography of objects first appeared. Opaque actions (dunking a plastic skeleton in blue paint or hanging a dumbbell from a pulley) have been layered, via digital chroma-keying, in various orientations to create a multi-perspectival “cubist” space. A rat, seen from above, scurries past a profile view of a striped flag quivering in the wind; a t-shaped dolly rolls behind a swatch of shiny orange fabric that paradoxically rests on a perpendicular plane above it. Gravity pulls in every direction while a seamless white backdrop serves ambiguously as both blank surface and indefinite depth. If the slippage between Hubbard’s performance behind the camera and the compositional alignment of color and shape it produces on-screen evokes the conditions of painting, his insistence on the rhythmic value of noise (as innocuous as a rattling pipe or squeaky wheel) reminds us that we are watching a time-based art. We might place similar significance on Hubbard’s decision to eschew natural sound in favor of a Foley soundtrack whose disjunctive exaggerations emphasize the material presence of each video, unhinging the actions recorded from whatever quasi-narrative one might try to ascertain. Sounds play in reverse. Footsteps reverberate unnaturally as Hubbard walks across the non-space of his set, and often we are aurally convinced that flows of paint gush with more force than the visual evidence would suggest. At times, sound and gesture even part ways completely—for example, the atmospheric clang of a harbor bell in The Border, The Ship II, which relates to the work’s title but has no apparent correspondence to the action within the frame. Hubbard’s unraveling of the suture between sound and image, his accenting of the seam between each of his digitally composited camera shots, and his extension of the gap between gestures and their significance again recalls Steinberg’s description of the flatbed, an analog of “operational processes” that is beyond “painting as such.” Paint—whether sprayed, poured, or splattered—plays a leading role in The Border, The Ship II, but the work isn’t “about” the history of painting, nor is it about the history of performance or video art. Rather, in “The Border, The Ship II”, Hubbard borrows aspects of these familiar forms to create a new, hybrid medium marked by provisionality and carefully attuned to the question, What comes next?
Photo: Alex Hubbard, The Border, The Ship, 2011 , Single-channel video, color with sound. 9 minutes. Courtesy of the artist, Maccarone-New York and Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Info: Kastro, Antiparos island, Greece, Duration: 24/7-28/8/2021, Days & Hours: Days & Hours: Fri-Sun 18:00-23:00, www.presenhuber.com
