11/1/2012
Whitney Hubbs
M+B, Los Angeles
The Song Itself is Already a Skip. Dark, raw, powerful and swimming in sensuality, the work of Hubbs is at once blunt and lyrical, formal and improvised, recognizable to daily experience and yet totally foreign from it.
This is anti-montage. M+B is pleased to present Whitney Hubbs’ first Los Angeles
exhibition The Song Itself is Already a Skip. The exhibition runs from January 12
through March 9, 2013, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, January
12 from 6 to 8 pm.
Dark, raw, powerful and swimming in sensuality, the work of Whitney Hubbs is at once
blunt and lyrical, formal and improvised, recognizable to daily experience and yet
totally foreign from it. Full of unlikely visual rhythms, Hubbs’ work creates and
provokes with aesthetic force. Her images reside in a reticence of feeling. Through
profound light and dark, a specific refusal of continuity or seriality, as well as
latent eroticism, Hubbs demonstrates over and over her disinterest in generic
narratives. Her work persuasively follows its own internal logic through her
willingness to challenge the relationship between photographic immediacy and
“authenticity.” This is the point of contact where reality and representation
become muddled.
While we are accustomed to the photographic medium as the revelator, Hubbs confounds
this idea. Abstracting through framing and with little desire to illuminate or
provide an understanding, Hubbs prefers to leave the viewer feeling — sensing. A
continual tension builds throughout the work. The darkness confronts you. The
release overpowers. It is a sense of intuitive wonder you are left with. Defining,
while withholding. Simply there. If you care to look into the corners, around the
edges and crawl into the vastness, you find yourself pulling wonder out of the chaos
and revealing something more.
Whitney Hubbs (b. 1977, Los Angeles) holds her MFA from UCLA (2009) and her BFA from
California College of the Arts, San Francisco (2005). Noted for her trademark
intensely dark printing, her work often recalls those she cites. Cinematic
influences include Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, as well as
photographic masters Edward Weston, Frederick Sommer and Manuel Álvarez Bravo;
visceral painters Michaël Borremans and Marlene Dumas are other notable influences.
Hubbs was included in 2010’s FotoFest Biennial, Houston, Texas and notable press
includes a highlight in Vince Aletti’s “Eight Emerging Photographers from Southern
California” for The New Yorker (2011) as well as featured in Blind Spot Issue 38
(2008). Hubbs work is held in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of
American Art: Library, New York and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
For further information, please contact Alexandra Wetzel at (310) 550-0050, alexandra@mbart.com
Artist's Opening Reception Saturday, January 12, 2013 from 6 - 8 pm
M+B
612 North Almont Drive - Los Angeles
Hours: Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 6 pm, and by appointment
Admission free