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Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler at Tanya Bonakdar
Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Sarah Valdez
Texas-based artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler switched from photography to video for their second New York show, but they remain engaged with the same inside/outside dichotomy they've investigated before. Here, the pair's pet binary opposition is explored as it pertains to both architecture and the human psyche, through a pair of looped videos depicting banal yet potent slices of regular kids' lives in American suburbia. The short vignettes show youthful subjects either inside or outside a building, and either inside or outside a group, seemingly feeling isolated under any circumstances. The viewer, however, is given privileged access to characters' underlying connection to one another--and also to the particularities of their surroundings.
One of the videos, Detached Building, alternates between two settings: inside and outside a warehouse/studio. In it, a bunch of teenage boys have a musical jam session. Outdoors, a lone malcontent teenage girl lurks and throws rocks in the dark. Hubbard and Birchler's camera pans back and forth, switching from the warmly lit indoor space to the cool, bluish darkness outside. (They had to completely remove one wall of the building to do this.) The guys sit around, nodding their heads in time with the wan, simple guitar chords that one of their crew plays. They all seem lonely despite being together in a room; each has his own solipsistic experience of the music. The angry girl goes away. So do the melancholy boys. Outside, cacti grow and crickets continue to chirp. Empty cans of Lone Star beer litter the cluttered, empty practice space. The loop starts again.
The second video, Eight, opens with the remains of a backyard birthday party, a video version of a picnic-table still life: rain falls in the night on ketchup bottles and mustard containers, balloons and soaked, swollen bread. Enter (or, rather, exit from her middle-class suburban house) a little girl wearing a pink party dress. She walks slowly to the table and sadly slices herself a piece of cake, getting wet. Later, we see her inside, dry, looking wistfully out a window at the falling rain. Adult presences are implied. Yet all that matters here is the girl's emotional state: she seems to be quietly longing for her own happiness, which remains elusive.
Birchler and Hubbard. emphasize their characters' feelings of estrangement. Watching the woeful people on-screen, one's natural instinct is to want to console them, or to prod them--"Why don't you just get out of your own head? Why do you spend all this time feeling sorry for yourself?" Meanwhile, the viewer's sense of being able to see what the characters cannot is part of the illusion of omniscience that comes from being outside the situation. It's obviously trickier to imagine one's own life being so scrutinized on camera.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group
