Stephanie Barber

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

STATEMENT OF ARTIST PRACTICE

for a long time i moved with the awareness of one so alone that such aloneness, the pure spectacular nature of such splendid aloneness, must be accompanied by a viewer. a listener. a reader. when and where this reception would occur has yet to be understood but it became clear that documents must be created. documents of attempts at communication. documents of failed communication. communication, reliant as it is on exchange, is so silent when leaving a body alone. more than silent it is not. not a thing, not a sound, not a sight until seen. heard.

so it is you that makes my art. you with all the sad and so funny jokes. you with all the ludic tragedy of death rushing towards us unmetered. you with soul and mind carved ready. you with words shifty, right and loyal. thank you.

ARTIST BIO

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 works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-human 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, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals.

Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema. Her books Night Moves and these here separated… were published by Publishing Genius Press in 2013 and 2010 respectively. Her collection of very short stories All The People was published by Ink Press Productions in 2015. Her haiku collection Status Update Vol. 1 was published in the fall of 2019 by CTRL+P and her full length play Trial in the Woods was published by Plays Inverse in August 2021.

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

CONTACT

stephaniebarber.com

Examples of Collage in Motion

Another Horizon

the horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, is 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.

here, the space between narrative and documentary, fact and fiction, is literally scratched between two voices, also cleaved apart or brought beside. jayne love reads a text i wrote for her––short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of richard (oswan) williams’ beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons.

Nature as a Metaphor for Emotional, Economic and Existential Horror

This collision of human domestic spaces and wildlife was an essential element of my installation at the Baltimore Museum of Art “Nature as a Metaphor for Economic, Emotional and Existential Horror”.

It is clear, the grace and beauty of the moving animal, fast and steady through the design magazine photographs. There’s the stark relief of “animal” against “civilization”; the rush towards (or away?) from extinction; an implicit metaphor of class; the meditative suggestion of eternally running, moving, stepping through; the counterbalance of these pruned domestic spaces, so set and stable and fixed to the idea of actuality.