Art galleries, the spaces designed to view and contemplate art, are full of practical clutter―exit signs, electrical outlets, hygrothermographs, security cameras, thermostats, and the like. For Canadian artist Joseph Hubbard, this clutter is a source of inspiration.

While visiting the National Gallery in Stockholm, he observed a 1930s security station still intact. In response, he created Security Station 25, a meticulous reconstruction as a ready-made theatre of the absurd.

In 2016, Joseph Hubbard generously gifted Security Station 25 to McMaster Museum of Art and he recently installed it in our 4^th floor gallery vestibule.

Other works in this series include a bronze cast of out-of-date plastic dimmer switches, originally used for museum track lighting. The objects are made useless, and eroticized in the process. It is also Hubbard’s nod to Jasper Johns’s 1960 bronze casting of Ballantine ale cans.

Another work is a full-size hologram of a fire control cabinet, using a process far more complex than the manufacture of the real thing, and aptly titled You Don’t Know What You Are Seeing.

Joseph Hubbard studied fine art and art history at the University of Illinois. It will come as little surprise, given the series described above, his influences include Dada and American Fluxus movement and artists Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys. Hubbard wrote that his work “frequently engages opposites: banality and sophistication, comedy and tragedy, surface realism and abstraction. Wit or black humour is intended to produce nervous laughter, which I regard as a kind of entropic verbalization*, as valid as analytical insight.”

*a term used by American artist Robert Smithson