Eat Your Friends

Résumé

Alex Hubbard's first comprehensive monograph, Eat Your Friends is also an artist's book.In Alex Hubbard's videos, kinetic paintings or sculptures look like martial arts movies, slow motion disaster videos, or snuff paintings about paintings. If wire work and kung fu make wire fu, imagine what cinematic effects can do to painting. Hubbard's videos suggest painting as a backdrop to a film and as a mechanical sleight of hand manufactured with the aid of a camera. Hence the celebratory debris in Alex's videos: glitter, confetti, champagne corks, circular saws (as soundtrack), cymbals, and spray paint. -Tan LinHis work takes on the complexity of every move in its own moment, time-stamped, often in a slew of single takes. The present tense in artmaking--a contradistinction in a period when gesture itself has become so heavily weighted and overladen with meaning. -Jay Sanders Eat Your Friends includes an essay on Hubbard's work in video by Jay Sanders; a poetry lesson in four parts created for Alex by poet Tan Lin; and a comprehensive conversation on the artist's practice with Debra Singer. Featuring a sequence of video stills printed on transparent inserts, created by the artist especially for the publication. Born in 1975 in Toledo, Oregon, Alex Hubbard lives and works in Los Angeles.