Dementia in 4x5 by Katherine Hubbard

"The American interdisciplinary artist Katherine Hubbard has spent the past five years documenting her relationship with her ageing mother, Antonette Berger, who in 2020 began exhibiting the first signs of memory loss. Her book The Great Room, set between the four walls of Berger's home in Philadelphia, is a culmination of grief and intimacy, as Hubbard steps into her role as caregiver. Using two large- format 4x5 cameras (which she is both behind and in front of) and drawing on her background n performance art, Hubbard transforms the once safe, domestic space into a psychological playground as the pair navigate their new reality. ...

In this portrait, Hubbard sits with her mother on her bed. Their bodies are reflected in a square nirror offset by a series of other square and rectangular objects (picture frames, windows, the headboard) which fragment the viewer's gaze. "This photograph was taken before she had a diagnosis,' Hubbard tells me. "It was a very confusing time, with a lot of uncertainty and frustration between us. ... 

"І am using the camera as а means of creating time with my mom apart from the brutal task of managing her," Hubbard writes. And to the woman who gave her life: "You might like to know that, when І think of you and see you, it's as a whole person."  

Inès Cross. FTMagazine. 

Individual

|

      INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC  --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

 SOCIOLOGY  :    POLITICAL 

|

Group

one fifty one (hand to face), 2021. Silver gelatin photograph	'The Great Room'
Collaboration Care in the Community	Direction Gaze

Katherine Hubbard

Book: 

THE GREAT ROOM.

Loose Joints, 2025

h290 x w219 mm. 88 pages

Text by Katherine Hubbard. Hardback. £46.00

https://loosejoints.biz/collections/current-titles/products/the-great-room

Photograph: https://companygallery.us/ - https://companygallery.us/exhibitions/the-great-room

Book cover: Amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Katherine-Hubbard-Great-Room/dp/191271969X

My source:
Inès Cross. Katherine Hubbard, FTMagazine. August 9th 2025, #1137. pp.10-11.

Ack. Antonette Berger (mother ...).

Vectors of the Biopolitical - (Chap. 2) c/o Bull

The Concept of the Social

'From one sentence in Aristotle derive two arresting theoret- ical discourses of the twenty-first century: Michel Foucault's biopolitics, provocatively reformulated by Giorgio Agamben in terms of the relationship between sovereignty and the body, and the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as a means of evaluating and promoting development, justice and freedom. Both are characterized by deep reflection on the sources of Western political thought, and by urgent engagement with contemporary social and legal problems. Both are in some sense biopolitical in that they are shaped by the interplay of the same Aristotelian categories the human and the animal, politics and nature. But they are on opposite sides of the divide that has opened up in the human sciences since the 1960s, and there currently seems no optic through which they might simultaneously be viewed, no way of integrating or comparing their insights.

 

In part, this reflects a situation in which political debate appears to have fragmented into a multiplicity of single issues. The ancient 'Who will rule?' and the modern 'Who shall have what?' have been supplemented by an array of questions that deal with matters once exclusively cultural, personal or natural. For previous eras, the relative integrity and unmalleability of cultures, bodies and environments rendered such questions redundant. Now they frequently appear unanswerable from within established political traditions, and incommensurable in relation to each other. Within this expanded field, biopolitics and the capabilities approach have unusual salience and potential, for both bundle together issues otherwise assumed to be distinct. If they, in turn, could be coordinated, perhaps we could begin to map the new territory.' p.68.

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

|

group

'Who shall have what?'	nature human - animal bio-
culture	political 'Who will rule?'

Bull, M. (2021) The Concept of the Social, London: Verso.

Mary Mattingly - "Life of Objects" 2013

INDIVIDUAL

|

     INTERPERSONAL    :     SCIENCES               

HUMANISTIC --------------------------------------  MECHANISTIC      

SOCIOLOGY  :   POLITICAL 

|

GROUP

	Mary Mattingly - "Life  of Objects" 2013

"Mary Mattingly's work Life of Objects (2013) is part sculpture, part performance piece. It forces the viewer to feel the weight of an irregular sphere of the artist's collected and nearly discarded possessions. The visceral experience of seeing this trash boulder pinning the artist to the floor communicates the harms of overconsumption perhaps more strongly than familiar reminders to reduce, reuse,and recycle." p.278. 

With thanks to: Mary Mattingly - Artist

My source:
Chianese, R.L. Sculpting Science, American Scientist, Sept-Oct 2022: 110;5. pp. 276-281.