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

West Space is very pleased to present the solo exhibition Dead Still Standing by Melbourne-based artist Lou Hubbard. Featuring all new commissioned works, Dead Still Standing will be the first time that a single artist has presented an exhibition across the entire five galleries of West Space.

The exhibition 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.

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.

Publication
To celebrate the opening the exhibition, West Space will be launching the publication Lou Hubbard: Dead Still Standing. This paperback will take the form of a visual essay and associative archive that not only documents the exhibition but also takes a broader look at Hubbard’s 15-year practice. Edited by West Space Program Curator Liang Luscombe and designed by James Oates, Lou Hubbard: Dead Still Standing will be available for $15.00, limited edition of 500.

Website
To further build on the conceptual framework of the exhibition, West Space presents the online platform Dead Still Standing, designed by West Space Journal Executive Editor and Designer Rowan McNaught. Built as an inventory, the website emphases Hubbard’s ability to make visible the uncanny in a variety of found objects. Adventurously playing with and messing with the form of web interface, the website is a shifting maze of video footage and images of Hubbard’s archive that will be built on and change over the course of the exhibition.

Lou Hubbard has participated in solo and group exhibitions throughout Australia as well as Hong Kong, Edinburgh, Auckland, Rome, Seoul, Berlin, Manila and Portland Oregon. Studio residencies include the Australia Council’s Paris Cite (2004), Barcelona (2012) and AIR Antwerp Belgium (2013). Hubbard is represented by Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne.