Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Single Wide, 2002

Single-channel video installation, color, sound
6 min 7 sec


Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler know how to tell a story as well as they know how to untell it. Emerging from their earlier highly staged and meticulously crafted photographic work, their cinematically referential, single-pan videos ask the viewer to consider how a story arises, and how it is simultaneously constructed. Drawing on the notion of architectural space as a psychological metaphor, Hubbard and Birchler employ and, as in this installation, often exhibit precisely built models and stage sets, combining them with camera motion that confounds the viewers' expectations to explore and ultimately blur the distinctions between inside/outside, real/artificial, light/dark, and cause/effect. The tightly framed, intensely saturated imagery creates a series of almost photographic tableaux, a conscious production of framed moments heightened by the continuous motion of the spectator’s gaze.

Single Wide revolves around a trailer house, a woman and a pickup truck. In the video, it is evening and the house stands in a landscape in the middle of the countryside. The camera travels in one steady movement, like an unblinking eye, circling the exterior of the house, the surrounding landscape and passing through exterior walls of the house to the interior. Inside there is a young girl's bedroom, a living room, kitchen, bathroom and parents' bedroom. We see the woman alone, carrying a bag with what appears to be the belongings of a young girl, walking through the rooms of the house. She exits her home and walks to a pickup truck parked outside. The truck engine is running and the woman sits inside in an upset and agitated state. It appears as if she is preparing to drive away. Instead, she drives forward, colliding directly into the house she has just left. Seen from the outside, the truck sticks halfway out of the front facade of the house. From within, the front cabin becomes an architectural extension, a room inside the room. In Single Wide, the narrative potential is built upon the deconstruction of the set. Reminiscent of some of the architectural interventions of Gordon Matta Clark, the house has been physically split in half in order to enable a moving camera to pass seamlessly from room to room, inside to outside. The camera movement implies a fracturing of the domestic space and echoes the physical and psychological turmoil of the woman. Single Wide was shot on location in Elgin, Texas in 2002. – the artists


Teresa Hubbard: *1965 in Dublin, Ireland | Living and working in Austin, USA and Berlin, Germany
Alexander Birchler: *1962 in Baden, Switzerland | Living and working in Austin, USA and Berlin, Germany