Soft shoulder - Everybody, Tucson, AZ
2022
Mold-blown glass, aquarium sand, steel, plastic tags, key chains, Baja Spurge
Photos by Maya Hawk, courtesy of Everybody
Soft shoulder presents a series of sculptural situations by artist Sara Hubbs that use a variety of medium and are conceptually grounded in the transformative qualities of relationships. At the center of Hubbs’ installations are vessel-like glass objects molded from plaster casts of plastic structures shaped using her daughter’s toy packaging—Barbie and the Rockers, Hello Kitty, LOL dolls, and so on. As a parent working from home, the discarded plastic became available material loaded with meaning and prompted the artist to consider the cyclical nature of inanimate objects and human relationships.
-Excerpt from Exhibition Essay by Curator Lauren R. O’Connell
Sara Hubbs is intimately familiar with breath’s capacity to be expressive, communicable, and life-giving—qualities of breath we’ve collectively reckoned with over the course of the last year and a half. Working frequently in blown glass, which uses breath to create various shapes and forms, Hubbs’s sculptural works and installations examine concepts of value, temporality, and care.
Hubbs’s blown-glass sculptures begin with source materials that are deeply embedded with human values while also intrinsically valueless. Children’s toy packaging is at once coded with the love and care involved in gifting and the excess and wastefulness of plastic toys that end up in landfills once they’ve been forgotten. Plastic food packaging provides sustenance with invaluable convenience that is matched by the ease with which it is tossed away. From assemblages of these raw materials, the artist creates plaster molds and then uses breath to inflate molten glass into slouching, bulging, and gleaming forms and vessels. Some of the objects become zombie-like in their glassy refusal to die. Others are voluptuous and effulgent, with shapely lumps and folds of skin. Each of these sculptures retains an embodied-ness that is drawn out by the artist’s installations in which the objects play off of one another.
-Excerpt from Sara Hubbs, “Inhale/Exhale”, Southwest Contemporary by Lauren Tresp
RELATED:
O’Connell, Lauren R., “Soft shoulder Exhibition Essay.” Everybody, 2022
Votang, Thao, Review: Sara Hubbs: Soft Shoulder at Everybody, Tucson, Southwest Contemporary (Online), March 15, 2022
Tresp, Lauren, Sara Hubbs, Southwest Contemporary (Vol. 3 Inhale. Exhale.), pg. 37 & pp. 46-49, Fall 2021