Gathering elements of image production—camera, light, clothing, position, and iconography—to engage the politics of looking, artist Katherine Hubbard stages her first performance work A thing and its thing-ness. It’s all just nouns and adjectives baby.

Exploring how countercultural archetypes become cultural commodities, and operate in shorthand in mass media’s rhetorical arsenal, Hubbard states, “Peel back back back static plastic off a recent purchase. A film of dank moisture caught between the layers. Lay back. Lay down. Lean down. Tuck in and hold hold steady still and stay. Stay language stay letters accumulating and spilling over you, ****ing mess on the floor falling leaking over the edge of the desk. You’re all over the carpet between the wooly nubby humps gathering to force a whole. But hold steady and still because it looks real good now. Reframe and start again. This is a take so grab as much as you want. Don’t stress I’ll be here when there’s nothing left. I’ll still be here, an amorphic form of tight-wadded rubber banded pain even if I don’t seem my usual self. I will still say hi even if I don’t have a mouth. I will still hear you even if I don’t have ears. The skin organ is a loose blanket taking the shape of a ghost dividing us. But please whatever happens just don’t pity me, just speak to me as if nothing has changed.”