PRESS RELEASE:
The Five Spot: Marion Lane, Bettina Hubby, Vincent Sabella, Laura & Manfred Menz. Curated and written by Shana Nys Dambrot
The Five Spotbrings together five artists (two of whom show a collaboration) who each administer the strategies of television optics and commercial desire as both the poison and the antidote, turning fervent codes and strategies inside out to get at what is hidden behind the surface. The show’s title refers to the casual lingo of televised programming and also cash money. The very diverse practices of these artists, all of whom live and work in Los Angeles, replicate for the viewer differently aspected optical and emotional experiences akin to the passive, manipulative vertigo of commercial surrender. These artists explore the way color and pattern stimulate the brain, using imagery, abstraction, and the in-between, delivering content but deferring meaning. Featuring, Laura and Manfred Menz, Vincent Sabella, Bettina Hubby, and Marion Lane.
Bettina Hubby is a polymath when it comes to media; depending on what the idea requires, she’s known to work in drawing, painting, couture, performance, collage, and catalog. For The Five Spot, she’ll be showing a selection of her quirky, creepy, expertly engineered collages on paper, as well as devising a new format for her ongoing “Sex Without People” traced-drawings series. Her collages often cannibalize fashion photography -- and increasingly co-opt its actual materials -- deconstructing and reimagining the elements of desire, appetite and aspiration at work in your brain whether you know it or not. The result are naughty, macabre, and deceptively pretty objects in which you cannot help but recognize yourself.
