Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler
Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler have been working collaboratively in video, photography and sculpture since 1990.
Like comparable spaces in museums everywhere, Room 18 in London’s National Portrait Gallery is trapped in a suspension of time and history. The images of the great and good – artists, writers, chemists (the room is titled ‘Art, Invention and Thought: The Romantics’) – never change, never reinvent themselves. The building itself, its architectural coding, and the décor remain similarly caught in their own time. There’s a peculiar intersection between past and present: at least two historical lineages come into alignment and temporarily run in parallel. There’s a subjective tableaux of Nineteenth Century cultural history; and there’s a new, ever developing narrative in the form of the museum’s visitors. As this encounter takes place, it’s flanked by two images that, in their narrative roots, offer a more specific engagement and displacement. This is the starting point for Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s The Year Without a Summer.
At one end of the room hangs a portrait of Mary Shelley wearing a black shoulder-less evening dress; at the other, a portrait of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, finished while she was pregnant with her daughter. It’s likely that Wollstonecraft died as a result of the pregnancy, surviving for just six weeks after giving birth. Looking at the paintings, it’s clear that the sitters were of similar age, and the two are now so placed that their subjects look at each other once more, and at themselves, the gaze reflected back within the glazing of each work.
These juxtapositions of frozen moments in history are the loose threads of potential narratives located, revealed, developed and then fractured in Hubbard and Birchler’s video. Their two-channel installation depicts two groups of female students from different schools visiting Room 18. Just as the room itself reveals alternative layers of history, the scenes of the video show the groups visiting at different times played out in parallel on the two screens. The first group of students gathers round Shelley’s portrait, sketching the image while one of them reads aloud from the introduction to Frankenstein. The second, seated before the portrait of Shelley’s mother, sketches while listening to a passage from her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
At one end of the room hangs a portrait of Mary Shelley wearing a black shoulder-less evening dress; at the other, a portrait of her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, finished while she was pregnant with her daughter. It’s likely that Wollstonecraft died as a result of the pregnancy, surviving for just six weeks after giving birth. Looking at the paintings, it’s clear that the sitters were of similar age, and the two are now so placed that their subjects look at each other once more, and at themselves, the gaze reflected back within the glazing of each work.
These juxtapositions of frozen moments in history are the loose threads of potential narratives located, revealed, developed and then fractured in Hubbard and Birchler’s video. Their two-channel installation depicts two groups of female students from different schools visiting Room 18. Just as the room itself reveals alternative layers of history, the scenes of the video show the groups visiting at different times played out in parallel on the two screens. The first group of students gathers round Shelley’s portrait, sketching the image while one of them reads aloud from the introduction to Frankenstein. The second, seated before the portrait of Shelley’s mother, sketches while listening to a passage from her A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
