Exhibition Review: Whitney Hubbs at SITUATIONS
WHITNEY HUBBS
Animal, Hole, Selfie
JANUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 16, 2020
Whitney Hubbs’s mini solo exhibition at SITUATIONS in New York is a medley of layered forms of self-reflection that presents an uncanny merging of the self and its extensions. Hubb’s work recalls a number of artistic references, with a Nauman-esque bodily examination and a Sherman-type seriality. Her photographs contain both a poetic weight and textural externality that as a series places self introversion alongside the uneasy surfaces of the unknown.
Gallery View. Image courtesy of artist.
Three black and white photos, individually titled “Animal,” “Hole,” and “Selfie,” depict dark and somewhat alien subject matter in their own respective pictorial frames. Though these images appear to be captured at different points in time, they feel horizontally continuous – as if they’re slowly melding into one another. Shown in isolation and stripped from their context, these subjects remain dependent on one another as morsels in a web of unwieldy conceptual significations.
A wide mirror with dozens of color contact prints on its surface feels out of place next to these black and white singulars, but the work’s encompassing title “Animal, Hole, Selfie,” clarifies its inclusion in this series. Kink and BDSM is a unifying focus in this work’s frenzied and subversively impudent pageant of bodily experimentation. These photos show Hubbs in a number of different bodily contortions and camera angles, with different props, sporting a variety of lingerie and stocking combinations, and a cunning innovation of different objects used for gagging. Showing an unconfined sexual self that doesn’t take oneself too seriously, she implies that this work belongs in three categories: animal, hole, and selfie, but makes it clear that these are only three of an infinite range of associations.
“Animal, Hole, Selfie” (2020). Image courtesy of artist.
The mirror’s introspection and the comparative externality of animal, hole, and selfie as concepts attempts to dissolve distinctions between the orifice, beast, and modern self-projection. Rather, they are all as embodied and as deep as the ocean blue as one allows them to be.
