Judith Barry
[4][8][1] Rather than employ a signature style, Barry combines multiple disciplines and mediums in immersive, research-based works whose common methodology calls into question technologies of representation and the spatial languages of film, urbanism and the art experience.
[4][8] Her formal strategies draw upon critical analysis, architectural form and cinematic spectacle[10] to consider subjects such as the body, perception, language, and the role of urban planning and visual technologies in shaping identity, gender and social paradigms.
[11][40] Visual theorist Johanna Drucker identified "voyeurism, spectacle, the power of display and the seductive apparatus of projection" as central to Barry's work—themes evident in her early video, Casual Shopper (1981–82).
[11][7] Critics linked the work's use of montage, persistent browsing and endless commercial space to ideas concerning cinema's recycling of unsated desire and the narcissistic pursuit of satisfaction through consumption.
[11][45] The installation consisted of a 10-foot mirrored cube wrapped with four (or five) rear-projection screens depicting a seemingly caged, androgynous head (in frontal, back and profile views) being successively flooded with muck resembling bodily fluids and insects, with each defilement followed by a video wipe restoring a cleansed face.
[35][46][47] Made at the height of the AIDS crisis and that era's terror of bodily fluids, it referenced work by writers Samuel Beckett and J. G. Ballard, theorist Julia Kristeva's concept of the abject and Robert Morris's minimalist mirrored cubes.
[1][35][45][48] Charles Hagen of The New York Times described its narrative dimension as "exploring the charged territory, prominent in infantile psychology, where the erotic and the scatological overlap … as the mammoth, enigmatic head suffers the plague of indignities … with a compelling, almost heroic impassiveness.
"[46] In later works, Barry often considered emerging digital and electronic technologies and the displacement of "real" places, architectural forms and grounded observers in favor of virtual spaces, screens and "users.
[49][6] For All the light that's ours to see (2020), Barry installed two screens sharing a common vanishing point, using disrupted, cross-cutting narratives to examine the shift from collective cinematic experience to the private, domestic practice of streaming.
[24][11] Border Stories was a site-specific video installation originally projected in the windows of an abandoned San Diego bank with four distinct narratives staged according to a pedestrian's movement down the street; it explored social positioning in urban and domestic space, particularly with regard to class.
Inserted as hovering talking heads in a darkened stairwell entry using concealed projection apparatus, it called into question the exclusion of certain groups from cultural spaces and narratives of the American dream.
[39][52] Cairo Stories (Sharjah Biennial, 2011) was developed collaboratively from video interviews of more than 200 Cairene women of different social and economic classes between the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.
[53][40][24] The resulting video and photographic portraits chronicled largely untold stories ranging across political hope and empowerment, the complexities of family life and class, and personal hardship.
[1] Prompted by drone photos of people adrift in precarious boats that proliferated during the 2015 European migrant crisis, Barry recast the scenario with images she took of museum goers looking up and smiling, then superimposed a 2016 Pew Center report headline (the title), connecting viewers to people displaced by disasters around the world and in the U.S.[1][30] Since the mid-1980s, Barry has created designs for group and themed exhibitions and her own solo shows, often in collaboration with designer Ken Saylor.
