“Dead Still Standing”
Lou Hubbard
30 Jan → 28 Feb 2015
All Galleries

The walls are painted a tainted pastel green. The photograph is of the corner of a room. There are two works, both two-dimensional adhesives on the wall. One is of a free standing brick fire place with a deep green shadow, the other is of a flat green curtain with an adhesive sticker of a clothes rack. Hanging from the clothes rack is an apron with a nude model on its, in a linear drawn technique.
Lou Hubbard, 'Dead Still Standing', 2015, installation view, West Space, Bourke St, Photography by Christo Crocker.

West Space is proud to present Dead Still Standing by Lou Hubbard. This project marks the first time a single artist has presented an exhibition across the entire five galleries of West Space.

Dead Still Standing brings together sculpture, ambitious in concept and scale, alongside a suite of new video works that examine the dynamics of training, submission and the aesthetics of sentimentality. This project is an opportunity for Hubbard to fully explore these strands using the entire site of West Space to unfold the formal and narrative synchronicity in her video and sculptural processes.

Lou Hubbard continues to focus on the nature of submission in acts of training that reveal the effect of training on one’s nature; this culminating in expressions of the cruel and sentimental. Building on Hubbard’s ability to draw out emotional resonances through careful selection and placement of the found and readily-at-hand objects. Horses, dogs, Victorian era furnishings and sports equipment form the strange ensemble of objects that Hubbard calls upon in Dead Still Standing, this shifting between formal play with materials and a sense of perversity through these objects to produce disturbing feelings in the viewer. In this way, West Space becomes a series of rooms with objects and screens: mute and screaming, equine and canine, past and present.

3 horse masks rest on two wooden chair tops, like bodies to the horse. 3 our of 8 of the chair legs dip their 'feet' into a green turtle pool that is holding 10-15 fruits and apples

Lou Hubbard sculptures and videos examine the dynamics of training, submission and the aesthetics of sentimentality. She subjects basic materials of domestic and institutional utility to acts of duress, measure and fitness - operations that pertain to the disciplinary spaces where subjectivity and knowledge are formed.