WHITNEY HUBBS
Animal, Hole, Selfie

JANUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 16, 2020
OPENING JANUARY 11, 6 - 8 PM

Whitney Hubbs gives us four positions to work from here. The first three are categories in black and white – pictures that bring language into the room (“animal”, “hole”, “selfie”), jumping off points, obsessive returns, ideas that won't leave the artist or that the artist can't leave. Each is symbol, metaphor, talisman, category, and provocation. And they are, together, the armature of an amateur psychoanalysis conceived ad hoc. The fourth position (the subject / patient in my psychoanalytic metaphor) is the mirror covered in contact prints of Hubbs' 4x5 negatives. The images are of the artist herself in a detournement of low, rough pornographic pinups. These pictures are steps into the abyss doubling as chances played for connection. They are degradation staged as eroticism (and vice versa), and they open into a wealth of both/and binaries in the attraction / repulsion or sex / violence mode -- not least of which is a surfeit of animal feeling drawn tight against conceptual thinking.

The usual place for this kind of complexity when approaching the body is in theories of sexuality, and for the content here - specifically in considerations of fetish or BDSM, which do indeed offer a compelling point of entry. But, as shorthand, sex makes for an overly narrow accounting; as also at work in Hubbs photographic performances are a teaching life upstate, online dating, decent therapy, winter, aging, humiliation, family, illness, death, loneliness, resistance, joy, humor, friendship, and formalism. Hubbs is enacting a set of psycho-physical potentials based on a skeleton of facts and evoking strategies from her own punk rock past. But at the crux, is an artist bravely searching for an alternative to the burdensome weight of American optimism, somewhere down in Acker or Beckett's register, and is generous enough to share it with us.

-Lucas Blalock

WHITNEY HUBBS was born (1977) and raised in Los Angeles, CA. Before starting her education, she lived in the Bay Area (CA) and Portland, OR. She received her BFA from the California College of the Arts in 2005 and an MFA at UCLA in 2009. Whitney Hubbs was involved in the punk rock riot grrrl community from a young age, where she made fanzines, organized art shows, and participated in performances. Hubbs was recently included in a four-person exhibition at The J. Paul Getty Museum. Two-person and solo exhibitions include Madeleine Cake (with Alika Cooper) at SITUATIONS, New York; Body Doubles at M+B Gallery, Stutter Shutter at David B. Smith, Denver, CO and Casemore Kirkeby, San Francisco, CA, and at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside. Group exhibitions include Screenscapes at Galeria Nara Roesler in São Paulo, Brazil, Ami Omi at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, and les vases communicants at Shulamit Nazaria Gallery. Her work is in the permanent collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, Los Angeles; The California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside; and The Riot Grrrl Collection, Fales Library Special Collections, New York University, New York. Hesse Press published the artist’s first monograph, Woman In Motion. She is an Assistant Professor Photography at Alfred University. Hubbs is currently represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in New York City. She is looking forward to a two-person exhibition at the Silver Eye Center for Photography next December, as well as a book forthcoming with SPBH Editions in the Spring of 2021.