March 12 – May 07, 2011
Opening reception: March 12, 2011 6-8 pm
Artist Talk: 7 pm
Cinema, the subtleties of its components and its history form the core of Hubbard/Birchler's artistic work. This exhibition will feature new photographs as well as the Texas premiere of Hubbard/Birchler's most recent video installation titled Méliès. Set in the Chihuahua Desert of West Texas near the border town of Sierra Blanca, this video explores the cinematic residue of a specific location named Movie Mountain.
Through a yearlong research process, Hubbard/Birchler discovered that Movie Mountain shared ties with the production of an early 1900's silent film. This relationship compelled them to unearth the mountain's mysterious namesake and its place in cinematic history. Hubbard/Birchler's journey led them to an unusual connection between Movie Mountain and the little-known French filmmaker Gaston Méliès, whose brother and business partner was the more famous filmmaker George Méliès. In April, 1908, Gaston Méliès set out to relocate his movie company from San Antonio, Texas to California-in an effort to breathe new life into his struggling business. Méliès and his entire company traveled by the Sunset Express train route that stopped in Sierra Blanca. The artists' research suggests that during this voyage, Méliès and his company interrupted their travel and got off the train in Sierra Blanca to film a movie. Hubbard/Birchler portray this fragmented and layered history as a two-channel projection. Méliès is the second installment of the duo's trilogy of videos exploring the social and physical sites of cinema. The Alturas Foundation supported the creation of Méliès as part of its Artist-in-Residence program.
Two seemingly identical photographs titled, Dead Cat on Movie Mountain, Sunrise and Dead Cat on Movie Mountain, Sunset, represent Hubbard/Birchler's simultaneous and fluid work in photography and video. These photographs juxtapose light and time conditions at the top of the mountain as the sun strikes the hairy windsock on a shotgun microphone, known as a "dead cat" in filmmaking.
Also on view are new photographs from the series, Filmstills: The End. With these images, Hubbard/Birchler turn to the movie theater itself. Their photographs capture an edifice where reality and fiction have merged - the reality of the place and the fiction of the movie. Filmstills: The End present vacant movie theaters in the state of becoming ruins. Selected and characterized by architecture, blind and broken windows, blocked doors and missing marquee letters, Hubbard/Birchler photograph the facades each from the same indexical frontal position. Filmstills: The End is a continuation of the ongoing series Filmstills which began in 2000 with cinema facades photographed in Berlin, Germany.
Teresa Hubbard (American/Swiss) and Alexander Birchler (Swiss) live and work in Austin. 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, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart/ Museum of Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany 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. 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.