Eight is a video installation shot in Austin, Texas, which revolves around a young girl attempting to salvage some cake from a rained out birthday party on a stormy night. The sense of inside and outside is interlaced and the appearance of real shelter continually shifts throughout the video. In a metaphorical sense, Eight explores the etymology of the word window (a combination of the wind and eye) and in a physical sense, plays with Le Corbusier’s proposition, Le dehors est toujours un dedans (the outside is always an inside). In Eight there is one camera and one point of view which functions as a steady, traveling eye that seldom blinks. The narrative is structured as a Moebius strip — the end and the beginning blend seamlessly into each other — to create an endless loop; an unending cycle of disappointment, desire and determination.
Hubbard and Birchler use filmic and literary references to develop uncanny narratives of disconnection.
Their work is simultaneously unsettling and affirming: we recognize the sense, the mood — almost. The disruption of the familiar, the unexpected, lends a melancholic quality to the work.
In addition to Eight there will be the presentation of new photographic work that further explores architecture and perspective, while continuing to blur the metaphorical and physical boundaries between exterior and interior space. The photographs were shot in Elgin, Texas in July 2002, during production of the upcoming video, Single Wide. Framing precise, alternating interior and exterior perspectives, the photographs juxtapose a trailer home at night and a woman sitting in the front seat of a pickup truck, as these two places intersect and collide with each other.
