M+B is pleased to present Whitney Hubbs' first Los Angeles exhibition The Song Itself is Already a Skip. The exhibition runs from January 19 through March 9, 2013, with an opening reception for the artist on Saturday, January 19 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.
