Alex Hubbard's first comprehensive monograph, Eat Your Friends is also an artist's
book.
Eat Your Friends includes an essay on Hubbard's work in video by Jay Sanders; a
poetry lesson in four parts created for Alex by poet Tan Lin; and a comprehensive
conversation on the artist's practice with Debra Singer. Featuring a sequence of video
stills printed on transparent inserts, created by the artist especially for the publication.
“In Alex Hubbard's videos, kinetic paintings or sculptures look like martial arts movies,
slow motion disaster videos, or snuff paintings about paintings. If wire work and kung
fu make wire fu, imagine what cinematic effects can do to painting. Hubbard's videos
suggest painting as a backdrop to a film and as a mechanical sleight of hand
manufactured with the aid of a camera. Hence the celebratory debris in Alex's videos:
glitter, confetti, champagne corks, circular saws (as soundtrack), cymbals, and spray
paint.”—Tan Lin
“His work takes on the complexity of every move in its own moment, time-stamped,
often in a slew of single takes. The present tense in artmaking—a contradistinction in
a period when gesture itself has become so heavily weighted and overladen with
meaning.”—Jay Sanders
Alex Hubbard (born 1975 in Toledo, Oregon, lives and works in New York) is an artist who works in painting and video. The use of the two media—in itself an unusual combination —is, for him, inextricably linked. Hubbard's videos take the question of how the mark ing abstract painting might act as an index of a performative moment and turn it on its head, using the process and practice of painting as an allegory of the everyday. Where their relationship to painting is the most apparent, these films record the manipulation of objects on a flat plane, which, close cropped and shot from above, then becomes the vehicle for paint. At other times they are placed onto what appears to be a painted surface, into which they sink and disappear, revealing the ground as simply liquid paint. In other works again the frame is deeper and the assemblage more sculptural.
In counterpoint to the videos, Hubbard's paintings often suggest a mechanical means of production. Fields of colour in fibreglass and resin are interrupted with richly pooled, dripped and poured paint. Their surfaces may be stencilled, trowelled or silkscreened—the anti-hierarchical choice of technique parallels the diy aesthetic of the video works. And through this deconstruction every traditional opposition of the formal language of painting is opened up: figure and ground, material and illusionistic depth, the horizontality of production and the verticality of display.
