In this new body of work, Playing Pretend, Whitney Hubbs casts herself as a series of iconic and haunted female archetypes, Dorothy (The Wizard of Oz), Laura Palmer (Twin Peaks), Carol Anne (Poltergeist), and Cathy Dollanganger (Flowers in the Attic). Each image extends Hubbs’s long-standing inquiry into self-representation and female interiority through performance, artifice, and collapse.
Posing in familiar yet unsettling tableaux, Hubbs reconstructs these characters not as nostalgic references but as psychic containers, sites where innocence, danger, sexuality, and absurdity co-mingle. Her staging is both humorous and disquieting: she inhabits these roles with full awareness of their theatricality, while simultaneously exposing the mechanisms of play, costume, and desire that underpin them.
The Playing Pretend series folds seamlessly into Hubbs’s ongoing negotiation between vulnerability and control, self and surrogate. Through these reenactments, she returns to questions central to her practice, what it means to see and be seen, to occupy a body as an image, and to reanimate the debris of popular imagination into something at once intimate, erotic, and strange.