Artist Ron Huebner passed away in March after being struck by a car while bicycling in Amsterdam where he had lived on and off for the past twenty years. Ron was born in Edmonton, Alberta. He went to art school in Halifax, New York and the Netherlands and began exhibiting sound-sculpture work in the early 1980’s. His work is best known in Halifax, Vancouver and Amsterdam, the cities where he lived. Early solo shows included “What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You” Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, 1987), “Need Me Like I Need You” (UBC Fine Arts Gallery, Vancouver, 1989); Galerie Burning, Montreal 1993, and “May the Circle be Unbroken” (Walter Phillips Gallery. Banff, 1990). Several works were part of “Stations” at the Centre international d’art contemporain, Montreal in 1987. “The Greyhound Series” showed at St. Mary’s University Art Gallery, Halifax in 1994. Most recently exhibited were solo shows, “Ed’s Psyche Garage,” in Amsterdam (Shore’s Space, 2003) and Hamburg (Kunstlerhaus, 2003). Ron was also a musician, playing piano and violin, often in the context of art events using the pseudonym Edgar Tiger.

Huebner’s sculptures made noise: electric razors were embedded in concrete, vibrating with futility; stoves emitted the sound of the wind; a windshield wiper batted a floating walkman around a pool while it played Peggy Lee’s You Give Me Fever; tables spoke (“make a decision... make a decision”); and sparks crackled around a bed made of heart-shaped electric elements. The work vibrated with living energy, it scraped and it groaned. It played blues piano loud in the hallway while you tried to read, it bent you with gypsy violin if you tried to walk a straight line, it mumbled to itself while you tried to sleep. There was an expressive ‘I” at the centre of each work, a parable,to be turned and a soul to be encountered. Huebner placed real objects in our world that are familiar to all ( a bed, a chair, a table, a pair of shoes). They are ours, but when we look closer they have been animated by a kind of craziness. They don’t fit comfortably or quietly into our neatly ordered space anymore. The sleeping bag is made of five hundred pounds* of lead - impossible to crawl into for comfort or to roll up and move on. The chair is made of chalk. The table talks back, The bed springs that are red-hot hearts. You bed will never be the same.

Ron had a faith in art as a practice embedded in life rather than a professional trajectory; it was a kind of balance to counteract the sometimes rough ride set to him by the world. To extend the metaphor of transit that Ron so often used when talking about his practice, each work was like one of the small weights tapped onto the wheel rim to balance a car tire, to calm the centrifugal vibrations and allow him to move on. His sculptures existed and continue to exist in a place of immediate empathy where human presence cannot be erased. Somehow his work occupied a common ground which made it accessible to an audience outside the specialized world of art. People could ‘relate’ to Ron’s work much in the same way as they could relate to him. I’m not surprised in communicating with many people after his passing that regardless of how long ago they last had contact, people had a vivid and empathetic sense of him. He touched people in a very immediate and profound way.I often thought of his work akin to the blues, and Ron as a kind of sculptural blues man. His work in it’ seemingly clumsy material persistence was elegantly tuned to a sort of intuitive ‘rightness’. It was decidedly more expressive than analytical, always asking “It’s like this isn’t it?” And the chorus responds in the affirmative, because we share this ground, in spirit not in specificity. Ron’s work was not strategic or ironic but rather a careful extension of his being into the world as an opening towards human contact. In its intuitive searching Ron Huebner’s work embodied an uncontrived truthfulness to which we could all aspire.

Andrew Forster

The author is an artist and writer living in Montreal.
* Correction: the sleeping bag weighed 500 kgs (1120 lbs)