Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler’s captivating exhibition smartly balances an interest in revealing the mechanisms of filmmaking with a seductive fixation on dramatic yet common stories. The cumulative effect of their art is one of mystery and methodical slowness. The measured pace of their crisply produced videos and sharp photographs engenders a heightened awareness that attunes the viewer’s senses to the nuance of action and the subtle shift of affect. In the first room, a series of large photographs depicts movie-theater marquees. Many of the structures are dilapidated and crammed into battered facades, suggesting a cultural and economic dialogue between the location of the theater, its state of repair, and the promise of the fictitious Hollywood realm encapsulated in the films’ advertisements.

The most recent work, Grand Paris Texas, 2008, is the clearest example of the artists’ penchant for slowly unfolding narratives fraught with the unknown, yet is filled with exquisite detail and implied meanings. In this fascinating film, the artists explore a defunct movie theater in Paris, a city in East Texas. Hubbard and Birchler interview the townspeople about the old theater, follow the film crew that explores the inside of the abandoned structure, and examine the residents’ relationship to Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984). Using a quasi-documentary style, the artists unravel a range of narrative threads that leave the viewer with an indelible view of how experience and memory can collide. A nostalgic ethos drives the film, which powerfully commingles inevitable loss due to the passing of time with frail attempts at salvaging the fleeting moments of everyday life. The works seem to be suggest that things fall apart—glory fades—but we remember.