Lou Hubbard: Witless

Lou Hubbard: Witless comprises the first exhibition at the gallery by acclaimed Melbourne based artist Lou Hubbard.

Hubbard’s art practice references the expanded fields of drawing, sculpture, painting, photography and the moving image. Obsessed by the nature of training, submission and subordination, her lateral and poetic approach to materials and their arrangements has received critical attention throughout Australasia in recent years.

Hubbard uses a combination of both crude and refined approaches in her practice, refusing any tendency toward embellishment or inscrutable artifice. Most often utilising domestic and personal objects, she constructs videos and room-scape installations that appear to embody a hidden narrative as well as evoking visceral responses in the viewer. Drawn to materials that are mass manufactured and are of institutional utility - the artist subjects these materials to acts of control and duress, measure and fitness. Sometimes this process is witnessed and captured through a camera lens (with the resultant videos presented in relationship to sculptural elements) and on other occasions the sculptures simply have an outing on their own.

Witless comprises both elements and presents two video works, Dogged and Drill, in which small figurines are dismantled in a controlled, almost loving, way by an unseen protagonist - with increasingly violent outcomes . A series of strange anthropomorphic sculptures bear witness to the action. By drawing attention to the formal and spatial properties, as well as the overlooked emotional potential of her chosen materials, Witless is both extremely tense and deeply reflective.