“Tyler Hubby demands his audience experience a cinema of time, which transforms the commonplace into an aesthetic . . . that the audience re-imagine the everyday world around them, perceive the everyday in a new way.”
– Jack Sargeant
Cinema Contra Cinema
Tyler Hubby began making films and photographs as a young boy. While in high school he was mentored by a then unknown young director named David Fincher. He later went on to study film and photography at the San Francisco Art Institute where he had the privilege of studying with George Kuchar.
His subversive and irreverent short films & videos detailing fetishism, co-dependency and bodily mutations have screened internationally and are featured in the book Cinema Contra Cinema by British author Jack Sargeant.
Since 1994 he has enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the avant/experimental record label Table of the Elements documenting artists such as Faust, Keiji Haino, John Fahey, Jim O'Rourke, Rhys Chatham, Arnold Dreyblatt, Zeena Parkins, Jonathan Kane and Tony Conrad.
As a regular contributor to Artillery magazine he has photographed such contemporary art figures as John Waters, Mike Kelley, Mark Bradford, John Baldessari, Shepard Fairey, Susan Anderson, Zak Smith, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Samantha Fields. Additionally his photographs have been used as evidence in federal court.
He has edited over 30 documentary films. Most notable among them are The Devil and Daniel Johnston, a picaresque biography of mentally ill artist/musician Daniel Johnston; Double Take, Belgian artist Johan Grimonprez’s metaphysical essay on the cold war, the rise of television and the murder of Alfred Hitchcock by his own double; the HBO documentary A Small Act; Drafthouse Films' The Final Member which follows the curator of the Icelandic Phallological Museum as he attempts to complete his exotic penis collection;and Participant Media's The Great Invisible, which won the Grand Jury Prize at SXSW 2014. He also edited and co-produced Lost Angels about the denizens of Los Angeles’ Skid Row and the punk rock documentaries Bad Brains: A Band in DC and Los Punks. He served as an additional editor on the Oscar nominated The Garden and HBO’s Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.
He also edited the gothic horror short Usher, by cult director Curtis Harrington about whom he also co-directed a short documentary entitled House of Harrington.
He wrote and directed Tony Conrad: Completely in the Present, a feature documentary about iconoclastic multi-media artist Tony Conrad that was named as one the best films of 2017 by Artforum.
