Almost Everyone Is Ready: The Cinema of Stephanie Barber

Presented by Cinema Project

Description:

Stephanie Barber makes films and videos in which verbal communication often takes top billing, but they could also be watched for their elegant imagery alone. She is continually drawing our focus, with the intense work of her art, to the tenderest spots mostly out of reach. In Another Horizon, a voodoo priest and priestess speak of death, while behind their voices, a 36-foot scrolling collage of earth and sky slowly unwinds, with a razor-scratched line connecting or separating them. Barber writes, “the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. A metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. A place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.”

For her project jhana and the rats of james olds, Barber made 31 films in as many days in a museum gallery that was open to visitors. She says, "I am thinking about the emphasis given to product over production, or display over creation. The piece is a video screening and an installation and a performance—a spiritual obeisance, an athletic braggadocio, a consideration of marxist theories of production (with the assembly line so lovingly lit.) It is a funny game for me to play, an exercise in concentration, discipline and focus, an extension of my everyday.“

“Looking back on the resurgence of experimental cinema at the turn of the millennium, it’s clear that one of the most significant artists to emerge from that moment was Stephanie Barber…” (Light Industry).

Lineup:

letters, notes, 1997, 16mm, 7 mins

Another Horizon, 2020, 16mm, 9 mins

3 peonies, 2017, 16mm, 3 mins

Catalog, 2005, 16mm, 11 mins

Total Power, dead dead dead, 2005, 16mm, 3 mins

shipfilm, 1998, 16mm, 4 mins

dwarfs the sea, 2007, DV, 5 mins

SOME ANIMALS, 2011, digital, 2.5 min

DEGAS, 2011, digital, 1 min

FOR W.G. SEBALD (TRAVEL WITHOUT TRAVEL), 2011, digital, 4.5 mins

oh my homeland, 2019, 16mm, 4 mins

About The Artist:

Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual, and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay, and dialectic. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and nonhuman existence (its morbidity, profundity, and banality) with play and humor.

Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Cinémathèque Française, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; MOCA, Los Angeles; and Wexner Center for Art, Columbus, among other galleries, museums, and festivals.

On Barber's work, James Glisson at Artforum wrote: "...the films of Stephanie Barber engage universal themes—time, death, memory, forgetting, frustration." Ed Halter at Afterall Online wrote: "Barber ... approaches cinema as a philosophical toy, intimately small, in which the play itself generates both pleasure and insight."

Barber is currently Department Head of Film and Digital Cinema at Moore College of Art and Design in Philadelphia. She is also a resident artist at the Mount Royal School of Art MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at Maryland Institute College of Art, and a teaching artist for the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and Image Text Ithaca.