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Flora
Date2017
MediumSynchronized double-sided film installation, shared soundtrack, 12 audio channels
DimensionsOverall dimensions vary with installation
Duration: 30 minutes
Duration: 30 minutes
Credit LineCollection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, The Friends of Art Endowment Fund and Museum purchase
Object number2019.13
Status
Not on viewCopyright© Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
Category
Label TextTeresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler have worked as a collaborative artistic duo since 1990. Their projects investigate how narratives are constructed, remembered, and collectively understood. The artists are best known for their meticulously crafted films that slip between reportage and invention, slowly unfolding with nonlinear plotlines and multiple levels of meaning.
Flora, 2017, was inspired by Hubbard / Birchler’s discovery of Flora Mayo, an unknown American artist who had a brief affair in the 1920s with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in Paris. Hubbard / Birchler launched an exhaustive search to learn about this forgotten woman. In Flora, the artists bring Mayo’s biography to light through documentary filmmaking, historical reconstruction, and dramatic reenactment. Each side of the double-sided screen presents a different story while sharing a single soundtrack. On one side, Mayo’s son reflects on his experience of uncovering a chapter of his mother’s history of which he was almost entirely unaware. On the other side, an actress re-creates Mayo’s unconventional life as a female expatriate artist in interwar Paris. The work unfurls as a conversation across time, between Mayo and Giacometti, mother and son, Europe and America, art history and contemporary life, fact and fiction, evidence and imagination.
Hubbard / Birchler’s work on Flora led to Bust, 2017, a brass reconstruction of a no-longer-extant clay portrait bust that Mayo made of Giacometti, known only from an archival photograph that Mayo kept under her mattress in later years. Flora and Bust powerfully address how history is constructed—what is recorded, what is forgotten, and how art can help us negotiate what lies between.
Flora, 2017, was inspired by Hubbard / Birchler’s discovery of Flora Mayo, an unknown American artist who had a brief affair in the 1920s with the Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti in Paris. Hubbard / Birchler launched an exhaustive search to learn about this forgotten woman. In Flora, the artists bring Mayo’s biography to light through documentary filmmaking, historical reconstruction, and dramatic reenactment. Each side of the double-sided screen presents a different story while sharing a single soundtrack. On one side, Mayo’s son reflects on his experience of uncovering a chapter of his mother’s history of which he was almost entirely unaware. On the other side, an actress re-creates Mayo’s unconventional life as a female expatriate artist in interwar Paris. The work unfurls as a conversation across time, between Mayo and Giacometti, mother and son, Europe and America, art history and contemporary life, fact and fiction, evidence and imagination.
Hubbard / Birchler’s work on Flora led to Bust, 2017, a brass reconstruction of a no-longer-extant clay portrait bust that Mayo made of Giacometti, known only from an archival photograph that Mayo kept under her mattress in later years. Flora and Bust powerfully address how history is constructed—what is recorded, what is forgotten, and how art can help us negotiate what lies between.
