Almost Everyone Is Ready: The Cinema of Stephanie Barber
Hosted by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
- Work Stills:
About This Screening
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 speaks of death, while behind his voice, a 36-foot scrolling collage of earth and sky slowly unwinds. The razor-scratched horizon line, which Barber marked by hand on each film frame, seems to both connect and separate 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. “
Program Details
October 26th
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letters, notes
1997, 16mm, 7:00 -
Another Horizon
US, 2020, 16mm, 9:00 -
3 peonies
US, 2017, 16mm, 3:00 -
Catalog
US, 2005, 16mm, 11:00 -
Total Power, dead dead dead
US, 2005, 16mm, 3:00 -
shipfilm
US, 1998, 16mm, 4:00 -
dwarfs the sea
US, 2007, DV, 5:00 -
SOME ANIMALS
US, 2011, digital, 2:30 -
DEGAS
US, 2011, digital, 1:00 -
FOR W.G. SEBALD (TRAVEL WITHOUT TRAVEL)
US, 2011, digital, 4:50 -
oh my homeland
US, 2019, 16mm, 4:00