In response to Sarah Oppenheimer and William Warren’s conversation A Path of Safe Travel, Katherine Hubbard’s provocation takes the form of video documentation of the performance lecture “back on back,” performed at Skowhegan, New York, on December 11, 2015. The performance and its attendant video documentation extends and complicates propositions discussed by Oppenheimer and Warren, enacting the discontinuities of spatial logic and perception, and socially and relationally constructed space, while sharpening focus on the subjective experience of the individual.

In the video document, Hubbard delivers a lecture on haunting, the nature of eventfulness within photography, and the role of the witness explored through a fictitious performance of treading water and the ways in which this proposed performance would be documented. Hubbard moves through parallel rows of bodies seated in close proximity, positioned to face one another with their knees nearly touching. The camera is focused downward for the event’s duration, capturing Hubbard’s feet and the audience’s limbs as she navigates through the temporary architecture of bodies. While Warren and Oppenheimer propose that the ground plane functions to visually orient oneself in space, Hubbard’s documentation takes up the ground plane as the primary object of focus, creating a disorienting and dizzying effect for the viewer of the video, and complicating its capacities as a perceptual anchor.

– Emma James and Alexis Wilkinson