Katherine Hubbard’s first institutional solo exhibition outside the US. She engages photography, performance, installation and writing to reflect on the enduring importance of the photographic image. For this new commission, the artist will expand on her series, The Great Room (2020–present).
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Hubbard’s mother, Antonette Berger, began to experience the effects of LATE, a progressive brain disease. Over several months, working with two 4×5 large-format film cameras, Hubbard and Berger moved through Berger’s home in Philadelphia, navigating the emotional experience of packing up a family home for a move into residential care. The exhibition will feature an architectural installation and newly commissioned photographs from the series, in conversation with existing images, spanning the six years Hubbard has worked with Berger.
Realising her largest sculptural installation to date, Hubbard will transform the gallery at Studio Voltaire into a labyrinth of thresholds that reference the partition wall her mother used to turn 'the Great Room' of her Philadelphia home into a makeshift bedroom, reshaping the house's architecture. Orienting and framing the photographs – and altering visitors’ sightlines as they move through the space – the installation reflects on the act of viewership, collapsing the space between photographer and subject, viewer and viewed.
