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Indepth Arts News:
"Uta Barth: In Between Places"
2000-11-09 until 2001-01-21
Henry Art Gallery
Seattle, WA,
USA United States of America
Compelling in its deceptive simplicity, Uta Barth's
art questions the traditional functions of pictures
and our expectations of them. By photographing in
ordinary places — in simple rooms and
landscapes - Barth uses what is familiar to
shift attention from the subject matter to a
consciousness of the processes of perception and
the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing. In
Between Places, the first museum survey of Barth's
career, includes seven important projects made
between 1989 and this year, a period during which
Barth has gained international acclaim for her
ground-breaking work.
Ranging from small easel-size pieces, to works of
billboard proportions, Barth's images play with our
expectations of the medium. More suggestive than
descriptive, her interiors and landscapes engage in
an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect
and habitual responses. In an early series, Ground,
Barth focuses her camera on unoccupied
foregrounds in simple interiors, fashioning images
of quiet space that seem expectant of
incident. Field is a series comprised of images that
explore the visual sensations of light in expansive
conditions. In a later untitled series, Barth's use of
multiple images in series suggests movement;
these large works, informed by film, recreate the
contingency of human vision. In Barth's most recent
series, nowhere near and ...and of time, she has
worked in her own living space, recording sequences
of light as it changes through windows and across
walls.
IMAGE:
Uta Barth.
Field #9, 1995.
Color
photograph on panel.
23 x 28 3/4.
The Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Gift of Councilman Joel
Wachs.
Exhibition print made with permission of Museum
of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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