Andrew Berardini reviews Bettina Hubby’s Pretty Limber 9.12.13

Autumnal heatwaves in Los Angeles never fail to diminish the refreshing thrust of new energy breezing from art spaces around the city. Summer wilts galleries into group shows and makes museums ever welcome air-conditioned hideouts for long-installs. But the fall, hardly ever cool in September, still brings in new skin for the old ceremony, fresh air before the mildish winter chills, not only in premiering first shows from new artists but also in bringing veterans to the city who rarely exhibit here and unearthing treasures from our more masterful locals. To launch the new season, Artslant gives you three artists having their solo gallery debuts and three artists who have proved over decades of work that longevity into autumnal eras hardly fades force but only adds new colors.

 

Bettina Hubby
Klowden Mann Gallery

From the utilitarian fire hydrant to the lowly orange safety cone, Bettina Hubby has long celebrated the individual power of the humble object punctuating the human landscape. Each with their own lowly but persistent if not essential service, they become not simple things but animated (if anthropomorphized) comrades. A record of my youth by Claw Hammer celebrated the simplest of object gestures when they titled one album Thank the Holder Uppers, but Hubby’s is not only a celebration but a body, outside of these hoorays for things and their workers (she recently made a perfume composed of construction worker’s own favorite scents). Included here in her commercial solo debut are a series of sultry collages, bodies made almost things, that lose hardly an iota of their swagger.

 

 

For original article, click here