Production still from “Night Shift: Gone,” a commissioned work by Hubbard/Birchler presented as part of Season 3 of Art21’s “Art in the Twenty-First Century.” © Art21, Inc. 2005
Glasstire is pleased to announce a yearlong partnership with Art21, the organization known for producing award-winning documentary films about the lives and work of some of the world’s best-known contemporary artists. Throughout their history, Art21 has made a number of films highlighting artists who are either based in Texas, or have a significant connection to the state. In the coming months, we’ll be co-publishing a small selection of these films, which show the rich cultural landscape of Texas.
Each episode for Season Three of Art in the Twenty-First Century concludes with an original work of video art by the artists Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler. Known for their haunting video projections, Hubbard and Birchler’s work alters temporal, cinematic and architectural expectations of the viewer through the use of looping narratives.
For Art in the Twenty-First Century, their first commission for television, they have created a series of beautiful and enigmatic short films. Each film uses the same setting—the interior of a police car at night—and begins when one officer brings a cup of coffee for another. Using recurring and non-recurring characters, interrelated dialogue, and ambient sound, the suite of films evoke not only the Season Three themes of Power, Memory, Structures and Play, but also sleep, dreams, and longing.
Teresa Hubbard was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1965; Alexander Birchler was born in Baden, Switzerland, in 1962. Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler live and work in Austin, Texas, as life partners and artist-collaborators. Both received MFAs from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Halifax, Canada. Hubbard and Birchler make short films and photographs about the construction of narrative time and space, without the context of a traditional story line; their open-ended, enigmatic narratives elicit multiple readings. They began their collaboration in the mid-1990s, making sculpture, installation, photography, and performance-based work. In an early photographic series, they created film-still-like images of people interacting with objects and architecture in ways that questioned simplistic narrative resolution.
