Pretty Limber

Klowden Mann
September 7–October 19, 2013
Los Angeles

From the Klowden Mann announcement:

Klowden Mann is proud to present the first solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Bettina Hubby, Pretty Limber, the inaugural exhibition in the gallery's new Culver City location. The exhibition features an integration of various elements of Hubby's collage work, works on paper, large scale vinyl cutouts, and fabric pieces.

Pretty Limber approaches the way in which bodies interact with and define space, and the individual and communal construction of identity. Boundary and its redefinition was a pervasive theme in the work, as the paper and vinyl forms comfortably inhabited their exhibition space while seeming to question its function, and offer unexpected possibilities for expansion, interaction and play. The forms combine to bring to the audience awareness of our own bodies, and the space we encounter and invent in combination with our environment and one another.

Hubby:

“I find collage the perfect medium in which to build kinetic sculptures, impossible gatherings, and conceptual landscapes that imagine a different state of mind or future.”

An excerpt from the LA Times review by Karen Mizota:

“Pasted directly on the wall or floating just in front of it, the larger-than-life vinyl cutouts are uncanny amalgams of fashion and advertising imagery. Both familiar and disorienting, they mine the psychosexual undercurrents of everyday visual culture to create uncanny monsters.

A slinky dress — most of Hubby’s figures are faceless or headless — extends an arm that ends in a boxing glove. A headless man grips the legs of another man like a pair of garden shears. A lightning bolt composed of various pieces of clothing is topped with a storm cloud of fur. More than the sum of their parts, they are elegant and powerful new animals.

They often also have a sexual or emotional charge. Hung low to the ground, a row of leather cushions forms a lumpy appendage that extends from under the carapace of a bike helmet. Although its constituent pieces are recognizable and benign, the image is unavoidably (and somewhat comically) phallic.?

CHECK LIST
PRESS: A WOMAN DEFINED
PRESS: LOS ANGELES TIMES
PRESS: ARTSLANT