September 09 – September 11, 2010

Opening reception: Thursday, September 9

Lora Reynolds Gallery is pleased to present a film screening of Grand Paris Texas (54 min) by Austin based artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler.

The screening will be held on Thursday, September 9 at Austin’s historic Paramount Theater. Doors will open at 6pm with the film beginning at 7pm. A conversation between the Director of the Blanton Museum of Art, Ned Rifkin, and the artists will follow the screening.

Grand Paris Texas explores the history, people and catalysts that have imprinted the small Texas town of Paris. The town was made iconic thanks to Wim Wenders’s acclaimed 1984 feature film Paris, Texas. However, for the town’s residents, only a ghostly notoriety came from the film; production and footage of Paris were never actually manifested, only alluded to by the film. The rich central protagonist lying at the heart of Hubbard / Birchler’s video is The Grand - a time-weathered, abandoned downtown movie theater. The artists use the striking imagery of this bird-infested theater and interviews with members of the community to explore the role of cinema and the identity of Paris, Texas.

In connection with the film, a selection of Hubbard / Birchler's photographs relating to Grand Paris Texas will be on view at Lora Reynolds Gallery from September 9 through September 11. The artists will give a talk in the gallery on Saturday, September 11 at 2pm.

Both events will be free and open to the public.

Teresa Hubbard (American/Swiss) and Alexander Birchler (Swiss) live and work in Austin. Hubbard is an Associate Professor at the University of Texas at Austin and both are Graduate Faculty members at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Bard College, New York. Hubbard / Birchler have been working collaboratively for twenty years in photography, video, and sculpture. Their extensive exhibition history includes the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, the Venice Biennial, the Tate Museum, Liverpool, Great Britain and the Kunsthaus Zurich, Switzerland, amongst many others. Their work is in numerous private and public collections around the world including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., the Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, the Staedel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Museum Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany.

Grand Paris Texas was commissioned by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in 2009.

The event at the Paramount Theater is co-sponsored by the Austin Film Society and with special thanks to Arthouse.