Katherine Hubbard “Avoid glancing blows”

Company (88 Eldridge St)

This event has ended.

Avoid glancing blows

This is not an instruction; this is a caption

This is a stingray under the water in the Pittsburgh zoo, eyes no active no camouflage yes and sense organ and this is light on the surface of water in a shape like an inside of a body, this is this body’s defense an edgework sense through water working through at the seams

This is rhyme the eye finds between this body and everything else: likes with like, some ancient shuffle way of thinking through, some blinking lantern thought of this full shape of light here and here

This is a perceptual field slowed down and vibration, the present of the lyric, all the static of the document machine in real time so fold so like a machine machine machine so everything all at once a fold and feed-back machine a making machine independent clauses. As if I were made and a maker. Sea Level: taken from sea. As if the image were still and we put all the tools to better use. This is a social feeling

There are two ways to say where we are in all of this. One, I gather all the cold rocks in my arms and say to you directly, this marks my spot here. Ground. Map. This is the way I am a toolmaker too: the event, the record, the interpretive tool in an “X”—a shape, a sign and signature: I am here. I want when I say “leverage” you to know I mean a simple machine too. I want to say the way to know a thing is to make a thing but these tools are too big for my hands out of my hands. The other way I am walking in circles

This is the turn

Let’s say these two things are not separate from everything. Let’s say it all comes in on the surface and mean it

This is life and so tender this is not a still life this is still life and so tender

As if bedrock. Water finds the lowest point of gravity, that’s what all of this is about. In a cave water comes up through the earth and to the surface of the rock and you feel it with your hand it is cold and wet and you know you know it when you feel it

This was the first tool. Strike surface squarely. Avoid glancing blows. This is one way to think through the distribution of force

I wanted to say more about ground

-Sarah Passino

Avoid glancing blows, a new body of photographic work by Katherine Hubbard, is the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. Working with a range of photographic techniques and image genres, Hubbard circulates questions of utility, leverage and the psychic resonance of a basement built out of the bedrock. Included in the exhibition are two large-scale silver gelatin photogram prints created with a camera-less process in a traditional black and white darkroom. The photogram images a well-worn polyethylene-coated woven tarp—a vernacular form, not considered for it’s surface, becomes a backdrop within the exhibition. Photographs taken underwater of legs shifting weight, side to side, as they tread water in efforts to maintain the buoyancy of the body are positioned on the floor and supported by armature of a double frame—small still life images of crow bars mirror this frame structure on the wall. There will be a performance held in the gallery on February 22nd.

KATHERINE HUBBARD (b. 1981) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages the intersections of photography, performance and text. Recent solo exhibitions include “Katherine Hubbard” at Higher Pictures (2018) “stages” at Baxter St. Camera Club of New York (2017) and “Bring your own lights” at The Kitchen (2016). Her work was included in A Collection of Slow Events at The Luminary in St. Louis, Missouri (2017); The Artist’s Museum at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2016); and Greater New York at MoMA PS1 (2015). Hubbard’s performances have been presented at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas; Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Hubbard received her MFA from Bard College in 2010. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York