Start Fall Start (2014) echoes this technique of immobilized animation. ‘Dead Still Standing’, for instance, has a connection to the chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge the visual syncopations of the curvilinear glass window creating a sense of arrested movement akin to a time-slice of the photographic capture of animals in motion. The suspended motion that this often entails brings forth an attendant layer of Hubbard’s work – its latent dialogue with both photography and cinema. The tension at the core of her work is the push and pull between the object’s acquiescence to the artist’s fashioning and its internal forces of material resistance. More fundamentally, the dynamic of discipline and performance that characterizes the sport has become the undercurrent of Hubbard’s practice, structured as it is by an incontrovertible logic of domination and submission. Her former hobby might account for the recurring equine imagery in her work. ACMI TIMESLICE SKINThe back of one horse’s mane is gripped in the teeth of the other the fugitive horse’s head is savagely injured, with torn skin revealing the red tissue of stretched muscles below, its bloodshot eyeballs savagely inverted to form a cavity accentuating the scene’s implied trauma.Īs a child, Hubbard took up dressage – a decision she now considers somewhat perverse, given that she had little skill in the activity. Carefully placed on plywood chairs, two rubber masks of horses heads enact a scene of violence. In Horse Pool with Dog Puddle (2014), another horse is not so lucky. The title of the exhibition pivots on this horse, referring to its inanimate or lifeless status, its previous subjugations and ongoing resilience: in spite of all, the horse still stands. In the titular work Dead Still Standing (2014), the horse reappears, this time placed behind glass in front of a window. Discomfort is key: squashed beneath sheets of glass or inverted on a sofa with legs akimbo, the animal is manipulated into postures of distress. Hubbard has deployed a life-size latex cast of a horse in previous exhibitions, each time subjecting it to forms of spatial coercion, so that the implication of unbridled vitality (the horse is cast in the motion of a gallop) is arrested by the discomfort of its structural constraints. Soccer balls, gym balls, fake eyeballs, umbrellas, items of clothing, towel racks, coat racks and various forms of metal armature that break up the space, create sculptural microcosms that reveal the unconventional aspects of banal objects and bring more unsettling meanings into play.Īnimal motifs recur, especially horses. Steeped in enigma and play, comicality and unease, the various works reprise Lou Hubbard’s signature strategies: provocative encounters between everyday objects, such as vernacular furniture, plastic toys and kitsch ornaments the anthropomorphizing of inanimate forms and the structural tension produced through the spurring of these objects into precarious yet tautly balanced compositions. Unfolding over the five exhibition spaces that constitute the non-profit gallery West Space, ‘Dead Still Standing’ is a carefully choreographed set of interlocking installations. Simon Horsburgh: Forthcoming and Untitle.Doctor Doctor: The Emergence of the Prac.Emily Floyd: Heide Museum of Modern Art.8th Australian Pacific Triennial of Cont.Spaces for Reflection: Natasha Johns-Mes.Endless Circulation: 5th TarraWarra Bie.Patricia Piccinini: Meet Graham: Geelong.
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