Hubba Hideout is like the best of house parties. You’re certain of buzzy conversation, the promise of erotic frisson, and the certainty of seeing friends, old and new. A group show curated by Club Rhubarb’s founder Tony Cox in partnership with CANADA Presents, Hubba Hideout possesses all of the vitality and vivre of a good-old downtown house party (a walk-up Soho apartment serves as the exhibition space, natch). But given the dire state of things today, the world burning down around us, as it were, even “Hubba Hideout” holds space for more pointed conversations, while reaffirming the very necessary importance of community, especially in times like these.
Curatorially, the works included in Hubba Hideout are grouped according to loose themes; the in-situ, salon-style hang of the show sets everything up so that the various pieces all end up in compelling dialogue. Directly across from the apartment’s front door, a cluster of works touch upon themes of sexuality and queerness. Jordan Eagles’s ghostly image in Rare Ongoing Ion (2023)—which incorporates animal blood from slaughter house, a mainstay of his practice—and Keltie Ferris’s Untitled (2025), a mixed-media work in saturated hues of blue depicting a headless torso and legs. Where Eagles has long-focused on issues related to HIV/AIDS, Ferris often uses his own body as a brush, the acting of painting very much an embodied process. In both works, the message is clear: queerness and sexuality cut to the marrow and bone of it all.
The constellation of images to the right features several works form disparate genres and historical periods, though the notion of “outsider” and craft-based art appears to be the theme. Soheila Kayoud’s embroidered textile work Div series #10 (2025) with its depiction of Akan Div—a demonic figure from Persian mythology, part man, part beast—sits alongside Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s abstract oil, No. 547, Jan 21, 1957, its central focus a spiked, biomorphic figure summoning the worst of insectoid-inspired phobias, albeit in dazzling, hallucinogenic clouds of emerald greens and ambers. “Outsider” as a term for artists has always felt problematic—most especially due to its socio-economic and metal health connotations—but in Hubba Hideout the term could apply to everyone in the show. Yes, it’s probably a capacious gesture to ponder, but who amongst us hasn’t felt outside of it all lately? Then again, who wants to be on the inside?
On the east facing wall of the apartment, several large-scale sculptures and design objects continue the interplay between the fantastic and the domestic. Open up Luke Malaney’s Saloon Cabinet (2022) and open a drawer to reveal a decidedly devilish sculpture by the late Breyer P-Orridge. A twisted ram’s horn nestled in the foot well of a stiletto in Shoe Horn #4 (2014), gives high-heel shoes a shamanistic bent. Speaking of, perched atop Malaney’s wunderkammer is Carlos Motta and Higinio Bautista painted wood sculpture, Shaman Eagle (2023). Eagles have long been a favored symbol for nationalist and far-right ideologies, and America is no different—see Trump’s not-so-pseudo fascist “America First” 2020 campaign t-shirts. But long before the Founding Fathers appropriated the great bird of prey for their federalist ambitions, it occupied a symbolic place of great esteem for many of the North American continent’s indigenous communities. Communities are many things, but as Hubba Hideout makes clear, the value of one should never come at the cost of another.
In the bedroom (remember, we’re at a house party) a series of works depicts an altogether different exchange of power—sex. Among the works are a pair of mounted—life-sized, presumably—flaccid ceramic cocks by Rob Raphael, Vincent Tilley’s Whip (2025), a ready-made sculpture incorporating the BDSM instrument, hanging from a ceiling lamp, and Tyler Mariano’s Of Flesh (Praise Be to Him) (2025), a photographic print depicting a flesh-colored dildo, its urethra pierced with an earring in the shape of a cross. Sex, of course, is never just about the act itself, though in the end it is exactly about who we chose to have it with, and Hubba Hideout’s approach to the theme is more or less unconcerned with any categorizing framework for the subject. Naming desire, enumerating preferences, sorting one group for another is a mechanism of societal normalization—give something a label, put it in its box. Perhaps that’s the point of community, of building and fostering relations between individuals from diverse backgrounds, cutting across the divide as it were. As Hubba Hideout makes stridently clear, we are all at our best, when all are welcome.