Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler

Teresa Hubbard
Irish, American, Swiss, b. Dublin, 1965
Alexander Birchler
Swiss, b. Baden, 1962
House with Pool
2004
Single-channel video; color; sound; 20:39 min.
Holenia Purchase Fund, in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 2006 (06.36)

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler use video and photography to explore the physical and psychological dimensions of space. Their work interweaves forms of reconstruction, reenactment and documentary into a hybrid form of storytelling. Structured as an inherent, seamless and suspenseful narrative loop, House with Pool follows a woman as she roams through a house after a party has ended, and a younger woman who covertly enters the same space. Although the women never meet and their relationship remains uncertain, they perform uncannily parallel actions, playing parts of the same composition on a piano and dressing in the same garments. House with Pool is set in a modernist house in Texas, where the artists lived and worked for several months; the house itself features as a major presence in the video, which explores the slippage between interior emotions and exterior conditions.