Teresa Hubbard was born
in Dublin, Ireland in 1965. Alexander Birchler was born in Baden,
Switzerland in 1962. Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler
live and work in Austin, Texas. Both received MFAs from the Nova
Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada. As life partners
and
artist-collaborators,
Hubbard and Birchler make short films and photographs about the
construction of narrative time and space without the context of
a traditional story line. Their open-ended, enigmatic narratives
elicit multiple readings. They began their collaboration in the
mid-1990s, making sculpture, installation, photography, and performance-based
work. In an early photographic series, they created filmstill-like
images of people interacting with objects and architecture in ways
that questioned simplistic narrative resolution. Their interest
in the construction and negotiation of space, architecture, and
the function of objects in three dimensions still plays a primary
role in their work. In the video installations “Detached
Building” (2001) and “Eight” (2001),
the camera moves in and out of buildings in seamless loops, blurring
the physical and chronological borders
between here-and-there, before-and-after. Their productions reveal
a strong sense of carefully constructed mise-en-scène that
owes as much to natural history-museum dioramas as to cinematic
directorial techniques. These works seem to be spliced from a larger
narrative, but the artists are unwilling to lead the viewer toward
any specific apprehension of what that story might be. Hubbard
and Birchler cite as influences Hitchcock, Malick, Mamet, Kafka,
Flaubert, and Hopper, all of whom are notable for use of the psycho-spatial
dimension. Hubbard and Birchler’s work has been shown at
the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, New York; Centro
Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela; Museum
of Contemporary Art, Berlin; Foundation for Photography, Amsterdam;
Center for Photography, Salamanca; Venice Biennale (1999); and
National Gallery, Prague.
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Hubbard & Birchler's Web Site | Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York |
