Uta Barth
28 Apr - 27 May 2006
Uta Barth
28 April - 27 May 2006
Opening Thursday 27 April, 6 - 8 pm
“The work invests in ideas about time, stillness, inactivity and non-event, not as something threatening or numbing, but as something actually to be embraced. There is a certain desire to embrace that which is completely incidental, peripheral, atmospheric and totally unhinged...”
Uta Barth, from an interview with Matthew Higgs, published in Uta Barth, Contemporary Artist Series, Phaidon Press, 2004
There is “a passage in a John Berger novel that’s stuck with me for twenty years, about looking at a glass of lilacs on a mantel. He’s unpuzzling what he’s seeing: the light and reflection in a mirror, trying to figure out an illusion and sorting it out step by step. The flower series...images are about light and time. They’re some of the slowest images I’ve ever made. Hopefully, no one will believe them to be a reverie about flowers.”
From Spanning Time: A conversation with Uta Barth, Cheryl Kaplan, Deutsche Bank Art,
http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/art/2006/2/e/1/421.php issue 34, April 2006.
Alison Jacques Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Uta Barth.
Over the past 15 years, Uta Barth’s work has repeatedly refused to address a central subject, presenting us instead with out-of-focus backgrounds, peripheral views and passing glimpses of scenes seen only in passing. The content of her work has always been that of vision itself and her often empty images point us back to our perceptual experience as the primary point of engagement.
The Untitled 2005 body of work was the first project to reintroduce a central subject back into her images. And it was a rather culturally and historically loaded one at that, as these were pictures of flowers placed on a single desk in her home. They were photographed over a period of many months, whenever she thought to place some there, perhaps as a reminder or marker that begs one to slow down vision in midst of the speed and chaos of daily work. They were not arranged and composed as a still-life might be, instead the camera framed them at awkward angels, much like a glimpse in passing or a long slow stare while seated across the room.
This new body of work, Untitled (2006), is the counter part to the series described above and consists of groupings of two to five equally sized mounted colour photographs that wrap around the gallery in a continuous loop. The first series presented images, occasionally interrupted by flashing red afterimages one might see when blinking after staring into bright light. This second chapter is the inverse of that, with most of the images tracking what is seen with eyes closed, and is only occasionally be interrupted by looking out. This projects embraces subjectivity and investigates the world seen with eyes closed. As before, the colour in these images is often a highly saturated blood red and represents Uta Barth’s interest in blinding bright light.
In the first floor gallery space two diptychs from the series ...and of time (2000), will be exhibited alongside a portfolio of 10 framed waterless lithographs ...in passing (1996), to form a context for the new work downstairs.
Uta Barth was born in Berlin and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is widely represented in museum collections including The Tate Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; MCA, Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. A mid-career survey of her work was presented by The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and the MCA in Houston (2000). Recent group shows include Out There: Landscape in the New Millennium at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio (2005). In 2004 a major monograph on Uta Barth was published by Phaidon, which includes an interview with the British artist, writer and curator Matthew Higgs.
For further information t: 020 7287 7675 e: laura@alisonjacquesgallery.com
Next exhibition: Liz Craft, 2 June - 1 July 2006, opening Thursday 1 June, 6-8pm
From Spanning Time: A conversation with Uta Barth, Cheryl Kaplan, Deutsche Bank Art,
http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/art/2006/2/e/1/421.php issue 34, April 2006.
CK: Your most recent series contains images of a flower. What is the flower series based on?
UB: A passage in a John Berger novel that’s stuck with me for twenty years about looking at a glass of lilacs on a mantel. He’s unpuzzling what he’s seeing: the light and reflection in a mirror, trying to figure out an illusion and sorting it out step by step. The flower series was a bit scary. It’s the first body of work in 15 years with a central subject and it’s not just any subject, but a completely clichéd and culturally trampled one. To me the images are about light and time. They’re some of the slowest images I’ve ever made. Hopefully, no one will believe them to be a reverie about flowers.
CK: The color in your photographs is often highly saturated or pumped up like cinemascope film. Especially recently, your colors have become even more searing.
UB: Those images are pretty much blood red and reenact optical after-images, seen after staring into the light. At first you’re still registering the blood through your eyelids and everything is a flash of red. After a few moments, the after-image becomes the opposite color of what you’ve looked at. The color receptors in your eyes have been exhausted by prolonged overexposure to one color. Color in this work is not really made up, it’s given to me by the view and my interest in blinding bright light.
CK: You’ve intentionally diverted or delayed the viewer’s response time.
UB: I don’t know that I’ve ever articulated the strategy of creating a diversion. If you repeat something often hopefully you’re led to think something else must be going on other than description. I try in every way I know to slow everything down.
...
CK: Why is anonymity important in your photographs? Why neutralize or eliminate the biographical?
UB: Well, I don’t want the work to be about me, so I carefully edit out autobiographical information. Still, people try to construct the identity of the author. In 1998, I made a decision to only make photographs in my house because I wanted to find another way to empty the subject out of my images, to separate meaning and subject. Seeking something to photograph made no sense anymore, but I still had to point the camera somewhere, so I point it at what’s so familiar and everyday that it’s almost invisible. I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase.
CK: That means slowly re-training the public.
UB: I’m told the brain processes vision like a motion-detector; it only turns on when there’s a change in the map. By photographing what’s invisible to me, and repeating it endlessly, hopefully it becomes clear something else might be happening other than describing my home. I point the camera at things I stare at day after day while talking on the phone, sitting around or waking up. When editing negatives for a show, I take out anything with “stuff” in it, because it instantly grabs attention. Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject. So, I diligently erase myself from the work and at the end of a lecture, a woman tells me it was so interesting to hear me talk about the work because I was nothing like she imagined. She imagined someone impeccably dressed, who ironed shirts all day and was a devout Catholic because my house was so neat in the pictures and red made her think of church. (I was wearing jeans and a crumpled shirt and had said things that identified me as not Catholic.)
CK: I’m reminded of Rauschenberg’s famous drawing Erased DeKooning. Despite Rauschenberg’s erasure of DeKooning’s drawing, its ghost is still there.
UB: Nothing asserts the DeKooning more than the act of erasing it. (Laughing)
28 April - 27 May 2006
Opening Thursday 27 April, 6 - 8 pm
“The work invests in ideas about time, stillness, inactivity and non-event, not as something threatening or numbing, but as something actually to be embraced. There is a certain desire to embrace that which is completely incidental, peripheral, atmospheric and totally unhinged...”
Uta Barth, from an interview with Matthew Higgs, published in Uta Barth, Contemporary Artist Series, Phaidon Press, 2004
There is “a passage in a John Berger novel that’s stuck with me for twenty years, about looking at a glass of lilacs on a mantel. He’s unpuzzling what he’s seeing: the light and reflection in a mirror, trying to figure out an illusion and sorting it out step by step. The flower series...images are about light and time. They’re some of the slowest images I’ve ever made. Hopefully, no one will believe them to be a reverie about flowers.”
From Spanning Time: A conversation with Uta Barth, Cheryl Kaplan, Deutsche Bank Art,
http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/art/2006/2/e/1/421.php issue 34, April 2006.
Alison Jacques Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles based artist Uta Barth.
Over the past 15 years, Uta Barth’s work has repeatedly refused to address a central subject, presenting us instead with out-of-focus backgrounds, peripheral views and passing glimpses of scenes seen only in passing. The content of her work has always been that of vision itself and her often empty images point us back to our perceptual experience as the primary point of engagement.
The Untitled 2005 body of work was the first project to reintroduce a central subject back into her images. And it was a rather culturally and historically loaded one at that, as these were pictures of flowers placed on a single desk in her home. They were photographed over a period of many months, whenever she thought to place some there, perhaps as a reminder or marker that begs one to slow down vision in midst of the speed and chaos of daily work. They were not arranged and composed as a still-life might be, instead the camera framed them at awkward angels, much like a glimpse in passing or a long slow stare while seated across the room.
This new body of work, Untitled (2006), is the counter part to the series described above and consists of groupings of two to five equally sized mounted colour photographs that wrap around the gallery in a continuous loop. The first series presented images, occasionally interrupted by flashing red afterimages one might see when blinking after staring into bright light. This second chapter is the inverse of that, with most of the images tracking what is seen with eyes closed, and is only occasionally be interrupted by looking out. This projects embraces subjectivity and investigates the world seen with eyes closed. As before, the colour in these images is often a highly saturated blood red and represents Uta Barth’s interest in blinding bright light.
In the first floor gallery space two diptychs from the series ...and of time (2000), will be exhibited alongside a portfolio of 10 framed waterless lithographs ...in passing (1996), to form a context for the new work downstairs.
Uta Barth was born in Berlin and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is widely represented in museum collections including The Tate Gallery, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis; MCA, Chicago; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. A mid-career survey of her work was presented by The Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and the MCA in Houston (2000). Recent group shows include Out There: Landscape in the New Millennium at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio (2005). In 2004 a major monograph on Uta Barth was published by Phaidon, which includes an interview with the British artist, writer and curator Matthew Higgs.
For further information t: 020 7287 7675 e: laura@alisonjacquesgallery.com
Next exhibition: Liz Craft, 2 June - 1 July 2006, opening Thursday 1 June, 6-8pm
From Spanning Time: A conversation with Uta Barth, Cheryl Kaplan, Deutsche Bank Art,
http://www.deutsche-bank-kunst.com/art/2006/2/e/1/421.php issue 34, April 2006.
CK: Your most recent series contains images of a flower. What is the flower series based on?
UB: A passage in a John Berger novel that’s stuck with me for twenty years about looking at a glass of lilacs on a mantel. He’s unpuzzling what he’s seeing: the light and reflection in a mirror, trying to figure out an illusion and sorting it out step by step. The flower series was a bit scary. It’s the first body of work in 15 years with a central subject and it’s not just any subject, but a completely clichéd and culturally trampled one. To me the images are about light and time. They’re some of the slowest images I’ve ever made. Hopefully, no one will believe them to be a reverie about flowers.
CK: The color in your photographs is often highly saturated or pumped up like cinemascope film. Especially recently, your colors have become even more searing.
UB: Those images are pretty much blood red and reenact optical after-images, seen after staring into the light. At first you’re still registering the blood through your eyelids and everything is a flash of red. After a few moments, the after-image becomes the opposite color of what you’ve looked at. The color receptors in your eyes have been exhausted by prolonged overexposure to one color. Color in this work is not really made up, it’s given to me by the view and my interest in blinding bright light.
CK: You’ve intentionally diverted or delayed the viewer’s response time.
UB: I don’t know that I’ve ever articulated the strategy of creating a diversion. If you repeat something often hopefully you’re led to think something else must be going on other than description. I try in every way I know to slow everything down.
...
CK: Why is anonymity important in your photographs? Why neutralize or eliminate the biographical?
UB: Well, I don’t want the work to be about me, so I carefully edit out autobiographical information. Still, people try to construct the identity of the author. In 1998, I made a decision to only make photographs in my house because I wanted to find another way to empty the subject out of my images, to separate meaning and subject. Seeking something to photograph made no sense anymore, but I still had to point the camera somewhere, so I point it at what’s so familiar and everyday that it’s almost invisible. I don’t want to become the subject I’ve tried so hard to erase.
CK: That means slowly re-training the public.
UB: I’m told the brain processes vision like a motion-detector; it only turns on when there’s a change in the map. By photographing what’s invisible to me, and repeating it endlessly, hopefully it becomes clear something else might be happening other than describing my home. I point the camera at things I stare at day after day while talking on the phone, sitting around or waking up. When editing negatives for a show, I take out anything with “stuff” in it, because it instantly grabs attention. Shoes on the floor, clothes, letters and objects on my desk immediately construct a narrative and identity of the person, and there you have it: I’m the subject. So, I diligently erase myself from the work and at the end of a lecture, a woman tells me it was so interesting to hear me talk about the work because I was nothing like she imagined. She imagined someone impeccably dressed, who ironed shirts all day and was a devout Catholic because my house was so neat in the pictures and red made her think of church. (I was wearing jeans and a crumpled shirt and had said things that identified me as not Catholic.)
CK: I’m reminded of Rauschenberg’s famous drawing Erased DeKooning. Despite Rauschenberg’s erasure of DeKooning’s drawing, its ghost is still there.
UB: Nothing asserts the DeKooning more than the act of erasing it. (Laughing)