Judith Barry

 ( 21st-century American Women Artists ) 

Projection as a metaphor—both its physical sense and the psychological projection of images and fantasies—figured prominently in video installations by Barry that extended the imaginative space of cinema to architectural space, challenging notions of public versus private, and psychic versus social. In the Shadow of the City Vamp r y (Artists Space and Whitney Biennial, 1985) and Echo (MoMA, 1986) considered the redevelopment of urban space and its disconnection from lived experience, shared community and historical grounding, suggesting a failure by Modernism architecture to deliver on promises of social liberation.Morse, Margaret. "Judith Barry: The Body in Space," Art in America, April 1993, p. 118. Both large-scale, double-sided projections, they melded imagery of shopping malls and high-rise exteriors and interiors with window-like insertions of fragmented film narratives. Critics suggested that In the Shadow …'s combination of anonymous looking and beckoning views invoked voyeuristic desire in "ceaselessly consuming," vampire-like spectators hungry for images. Echo (referencing the Echo and Narcissus myth) depicted archetypal businessmen trapped and staring out of gridded glass structures that reviewer Andy Grundberg wrote, evoked "the anonymity and anomie of corporate work places, and the narcissism of those who inhabit them."Fisher, Jean. "Judith Barry," Artforum, September 1986. Retrieved May 21, 2024.

Barry's use of contradictory vantage points inside and outside the same physical and visual spaces in those works highlights her emphasis on kinesthetic and perceptual rather than idealized visual paradigms (e.g., perspectival vision) for meaning-making—an approach that often requires spectators to navigate physical parameters and conflicting modes of signification.Newman, Michael. "Judith Barry," 100 Video Artists, R. Oliveras (ed.). Madrid: Exit, 2010. For example, in Model for Stage and Screen (1987), she considered the functional effects of architecture, asking spectators to step into a large circular chamber containing a glowing pillar of green light. Upon exiting, rather than return to normal vision they experienced a purely perceptual, intense series of afterimages, suspending them between different ways of "seeing." For The Work of the Forest (1992) Barry used three synchronized video tracks on transparent screens to consider the conflicting histories of African art, Art Nouveau and the Belgian Congo; the continuous panorama of imagery undercut the visual coherence of monocular perspective, potentially stimulating multiple subject positions and interpretations. In Voice off (1998–99) she emphasized sound and bodily movement with back-to-back projections of metaphoric narratives: one of a dream-like, possibly imaginary, performance and the other of a male writer haunted by and unable to locate the source of its voices. She employed a scrim on one side of the screen allowing viewers to move between the separated narratives, spatializing the film convention of shot and counter shot, while exploiting the power of suggestion and visualization created through voice and sound.Frac Lorraine. Judith Barry, Voice Off, Collection. Retrieved May 21, 2024.

Imagination, dead imagine (Fundació La Caixa and Nicole Klagsbrun, 1991; Mary Boone Gallery, 2018) emphasized movement, but more insistently, foregrounded a visceral, corporeal "infection" of its own pristine form and exhibition space.Geers, David. "Judith Barry," Frieze, June 20, 2017. Retrieved May 22, 2024. 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.Hagen, Charles. "Judith Barry," The New York Times, October 25, 1991. Retrieved May 21, 2024.Wilson, Michael. "Judith Barry, 'imagination, dead imagine'," Time Out, June 9, 2017. 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 Abjection and Robert Morris's minimalist mirrored cubes.Morris, Susan. "Judith Barry's Imagination, dead imagine references horror films and J.G. Ballard," The Architect's Newspaper, July 7, 2017. Retrieved May 21, 2024. 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."

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." In Rouen: Touring machines/Intermittent Futures (1993), she combined fiber-optics, the book and video projection to create a shifting cyberspace/fictional guidebook of immaterial images connecting cultures, places, times and literature prompted by the history of Rouen, France. Speedflesh (1998, Wexner Center) was described by curator Sarah Perks as "part computer game, cinematic and narrative inquiry, art installation and immersive experience"; its science-fiction narrative structure explored the digital realm in relation to technologies of the body.Perks, Sarah. "The Dynamics of Desire: Judith Barry in conversation with Sarah Perks," Electronic Superhighway, London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2016. 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.Valentina, Barbara. "All the Light that's ours to see," Umbigo Magazine, December 2020.