Buttons, plates, marbles, bottles, coins, bullets, keys and other historic artifacts are suspended in a rhythmic free fall, a choreographed parade, in Hubbard / Birchler’s video art installation, commissioned by Waterloo Greenway for the Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park, in Austin.

The artifacts in Past Deposits date from the late nineteenth to mid twentieth centuries and were discovered by archaeologists on the site of what is now Waterloo Park and Waller Creek in Austin, Texas. Hubbard / Birchler spent more than a year studying the artifacts and have rendered these small, domestic objects into incredibly detailed, monumentally scaled image projections. Histories are revivified through the array of artifacts, each touched by human hands, that were washed downstream or buried under layers of earth during the floods that swept through the area time and time again. Taking the state of being washed away as a point of departure, Hubbard / Birchler have re-organized the artifacts into non-hierarchical groupings and choreographed them into a continuous flow, adrift in a current or stream.

Hubbard / Birchler worked with composer Alex Weston to create an accompanying score. Past Deposits will be shown nightly at Waterloo Park for five years, except evenings when a ticketed concert or other special event is taking place. The schedule of screenings can be found below.