Ballroom Marfa and Tito’s Vodka Cocktail Reception
Friday, October 10 from 6-8pm

Ballroom Marfa invites you to join us in welcoming Executive Director Susan Sutton at a Sound Speed Marker cocktail reception this Chinati Weekend. We’ll be serving beer, wine and Tito’s vodka cocktails in the gallery to go along with the continuing Sound Speed Marker exhibition from Hubbard/Birchler.

Sutton, a regular visitor to Far West Texas, joins us here in Marfa after a four-year tenure at Houston’s Menil Collection. Read more about our new executive director here.

Sound Speed Marker documents sites of forgotten film history in Texas with photography, sculpture and three video installations in the Ballroom Marfa gallery. As Alexander Birchler told Irina Arnaut in a recent interview in Bomb Magazine,

Over the course of developing the component works for Sound Speed Marker, we considered a number of different sites around the country and even a couple of sites in Europe. The three sites we chose to commit to and explore over time were challenging and resonant for us on a number of exciting and unknown levels. They all share the potential of a curiously missed mark – we’re visiting these sites at the wrong time.

Hubbard/Birchler’s Sound Speed Marker will be on view at Ballroom Marfa until October 26. The exhibition will then travel to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in December 2014 and the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston in May 2015.

Early last month, we were lucky enough to work with Marfa Public Radio and Dixon Water Foundation to present Summer Field Recordings, a workshop in conjunction with Marfa ISD’s Summer Shakeup program. Students were able to investigate Mimm’s Ranch while experimenting with recording equipment and documenting their experiences. The project was inspired by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s cinematic exploration of the Far West Texas landscape, but it turned into something a good deal sillier.

To see what we mean, check out the final product, Marfa Silly News:

Marfa Silly News from Ballroom Marfa on Vimeo.

Support for this program provided by The Dixon Water Foundation and the Texas Commission on the Arts, with generous contributions by Ballroom Marfa members.

Special thanks to Sally Beauvais, The Big Bend Sentinel, Michael Camacho, Jennifer Bell and Tim Crowley of the Crowley Theater, Tim Johnson, Marfa Book Company, Marfa ISD, Marfa Public Radio, Tom Michael, Andrew Peters, Robert Potts, Alice Quinlan, Suzy Simon, Casey Wade, and Sam Winks.

McCoy could make no similar claim against Egan for his six years on the because, until recently, Egan never filed the required disclosures with the district and state education commissionerA team of youth volunteers distributed pamphlets and performed street plays for the benefit of passengers. His other score was a course record tying 61 in the second round Friday. in 1733, although he had probably settled on that land much earlier. Inspected on April 3; 11 violations,

Giant, 2014. Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler
High Definition video with sound 30min., loop. Courtesy of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery, Austin. Commissioned by Ballroom Marfa

Irina Arnaut for Bomb recently interviewed artists Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, whose solo exhibition Sound, Speed, Marker is currently on view at Ballroom. In it they discuss the making of their work Eight, Eighteen, as well as the three films included in the exhibition (Grand Paris Texas, Movie Mountain (Méliès), and Giant).

An excerpt:

Irina Arnaut: At the end of Giant, the secretary who’s been writing up the contract, gazes thoughtfully out the window and then looks directly at the camera/viewer. I wondered about that for a long time. Usually with a movie you think of the lead actors and directors first, then perhaps cinematographers, producers, and so forth—never really the secretary who drew up the production contract. Throughout your Giant, this secretary is the only person we ever associate with the 1956 production of Giant. So in a way she comes to represent the making of the 1956 Giant. When she looks directly at the camera, I couldn’t tell what she was thinking or what she meant except to claim her presence or existence—not confrontational, but certainly assertive. Were you interested in deconstructing or rearranging power dynamics often associated with the movies?

Teresa Hubbard: This is a perceptive insight about the secretary’s stance. She is the presence and placeholder for what is absent, yet she wears and alters this representation through the unfolding of the narrative.

Alexander Birchler: There are several moments throughout Giant—indeed in all the works we’ve been talking about in Sound Speed Marker, as well as Eight, Eighteen—where we consciously break the fourth wall, and, in different ways, employ strategies of Brecht’s distancing effect, or Verfremdungseffekt. We are interested in establishing a terrain that offers immersion for the viewer, in order to twist and entangle that kind of viewing position with other meta-positions.

Images from the March 28, 2014 Sound Speed Marker opening reception at Ballroom Marfa. All photos by Alex Marks.

Movie Mountain (Méliès), 2011
Production still
High definition video with sound

Drew Stuart, editor of the Hudspeth County Herald, writes about the 2011 installation of Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s Movie Mountain (Méliès) at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York. The film documents the forgotten history of an otherwise unremarkable geographic feature outside of Sierra Blanca, and Stuart speaks with John Elder, one of the Hudspeth County residents participating in the project. Movie Mountain (Méliès) will screen alongside 2009’s Grand Paris Texas and the premiere of the Ballroom Marfa-commissioned Giant as part of Sound Speed Marker, opening here in Marfa on February 28, 2014.

From the January 28, 2011 edition of the Herald …

Featuring Sierra Blanca Residents, Movie Mountain Film Screens in Manhattan

This month and next a group of Sierra Blanca-area residents are making their presence felt almost 2,000 miles, in a rather unlikely location: a gallery in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood.

Méliès, a film by Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler, opened at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Jan. 8, and screenings will continue through Feb. 5. The film focuses on Movie Mountain, an unassuming peak northeast of Sierra Blanca; the film uses conversations with local residents to explore that peak’s somewhat shadowy connection to the silent-movie era.

Hudspeth County residents included in the 24-minute movie include David Armstrong, Kit Bramblett, John Elder, Tom D. Ellison, Gary Jennings, Ben Lowry, Julio Marta, Sara Marta, Tom Neely, Christina Ramirez and James Rush. The New York Times printed a positive review of the film on Jan. 13, describing it as “beautifully made.”

Located on old McAdoo ranch land, the peak has been known as Movie Mountain for many decades. According to local lore, a silent-film crew shot footage at the hill in the early part of the 20th century. Local memories of the filming are scant on details, and footage from a film at Movie Mountain has not been found or identified.

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler Eighteen, 2013. UHD Video with Sound. Duration: 18 min 30 sec, loop. Installation dimensions variable. Image copyright of the artists. Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery New York and Lora Reynolds Gallery Austin.

If you missed Hubbard/Birchler’s Eight, Eighteen at the Linda Pace Foundation in October, you’re in luck! The video exhibition will be opening on February 15 at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City; so be sure to see it before heading out to Marfa for the artists’ upcoming exhibition Sound Speed Marker at Ballroom.

From our previous blog post about Eight, Eighteen:

Eight, Eighteen consists of two films: Eight from 2001, which revolves around the birthday of an eight-year-old girl and Eighteen (2013), which follows the same subject, only 10 years later on her 18th birthday. Due to video looping, changing locations, and the non-linear and disjointed narrative present in both films, the viewer is forced to question what is fact and what is fiction, leading one to examine the larger theme at the core of Hubbard/Birchler’s work: the subtleties found in cinema’s components and within its history.

Eight, Eighteen opens on February 15 and closes March 15, 2014 at Tanya Bonakdar in NYC.
Sound Speed Marker will premiere on February 28th and the installation will run until July 31st,