Featuring a black vinyl cover with gold foil stamping, Say So brings together Whitney Hubbs’ recent self-portraits, made in the style of cheap, pornographic pin-up photography. Say So continues her quest to explore and challenge the relationship between the camera and the female body. In it, she uses and abuses her own body to revealing effect in masochistic (BDSM) performances which sit at the intersection of eroticism and humiliation and are wonderfully uncomfortable to digest.
Using the camera as both an audience and a mirror, Hubbs positions her work within a long tradition of artists using photographic self-portraiture―from Claude Cahun to Valie Export and Boris Mikhailov―and reworks its language with a stripped-down, rowdy formalism that pays homage to her Riot Grrrl past. Say So offers up an outside position (drenched in inky black humor) responding to precarity, loneliness and marginalization in a world badly off its tilt.