PAST EXHIBITION

stages

Katherine Hubbard

Baxter St at the Camera Club of New York presents stages, an exhibition of photographs and drawings by 2016 Workspace Resident Katherine Hubbard. The exhibition brings together a series of untitled drawings as well as two unique photogram installations.

Hubbard considers the field of vision of the camera to be a physical space with boundaries delineated by an invisible cut, the line which separates what is in and out of the frame.  In the exhibition, the series of 15 untitled drawings work collectively to diagram an array of triangulations, each angle representing the point of view of a single camera. In diagramming the field of vision of two cameras, Hubbard considers the social potentiality of these drawings as both cameras are being asked to coordinate and negotiate vision together. They work collectively, though not always in mimicry, to assemble the field and or mark the physicality of the field in a way that is relational. The drawings work as a placeholder for the slippery space between the camera and body as Hubbard diagrams the ways in which our orientations towards each other matter.

This negotiation with orientation also carries into the two large body-scaled photogram works included in the exhibition. Each work uses a fold to articulate a vertical and horizontal axis within the gallery. The frames for these two works both extend well beyond the framed photogram creating a second frame in order to enlist the physical space of the gallery as image. These unique photogram prints are made in the darkroom by a process which orients the paper vertically in relation to the enlarger above. They have a hermetic self-contained logic in that each is a photogram of the shadow cast by the enlarger light upon the fold. An image of its own physicality by the terms of its own making. The imprinted shadow mingles with the shadow cast by ambient light. Hovering between, these works retain both the image and objectness of the fold.

Hubbards drawings articulate the potential of both the body and camera to delineate space while her large scale photogram installations lead us back to the very real and physical boundaries of the gallery itself. The fold being on scale with the viewers body becomes an essential nod to phenomenological divisions which rather then dividing work in tandem; the capacity to both see and be seen, though not the same thing, are nevertheless entangled.