Judith Barry

Judith Barry, Imagination, dead imagine, Installation: 5 channel video-sound projection, 10' x 10' x 10', 1991/2018.

Judith Barry (born 1954) is an American multimedia artist, writer and educator. Art critics regard her as a pioneer in performance art, video, electronic media and installation art who has contributed significantly to feminist theories of subjectivity and the exploration of public constructions of gender and identity. Her work draws on a diverse background, which includes studies in critical theory and cinema, dance, and training in architecture, design and computer graphics. Critic Kate Linker wrote, "Barry has examined the effects and ideological functions of images in and on society. Her installations and writings … have charted the transformation of representation by different 'machines' of image production, from the spatial ensembles of theater to computer and electronic technologies." Centre Pompidou, MACBA (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona) MUMOK (Austria), and KANAL - Centre Pompidou, among others. She has exhibited at MoMA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), the New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Documenta, and the biennales of Berlin, Sharjah, Sydney, Venice and the Whitney Museum, among other venues. Barry has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Prize and Anonymous Was A Woman Award. She is based in New York and is a professor and in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.

Barry's performance works engaged themes involving voyeurism and women's role as subject and object of the erotic gaze. They often situated her own body as the site of conceptual and visual experiment. After pushing her art toward installation, she moved to New York in the 1980s, continuing her work in exhibition design, multimedia and new digital technologies.

Work and critical reception Barry's work has links to conceptual art, feminist performance art, critical theory and cinema studies.

Critics define Barry's practice as much in relation to cultural theory and methodology as through aesthetic issues. the influence of architectural space and urban planning on identity, social behavior and power relations; insistence on a participatory, meaning-productive spectator;

Individual works and installations Judith Barry, Model for Stage and Screen, installation view, 1987. Visual theorist Johanna Drucker identified "voyeurism, spectacle, the power of display and the seductive apparatus of projection" as central to Barry's work—themes evident in her early video, Casual Shopper (1981–82). 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.

Judith Barry, Voice Off, Installation: 2 channel video, sound projection, 1999. 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. 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."

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. 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. 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 abject and Robert Morris's minimalist mirrored cubes. 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."

"Not Reconciled" series and related projects In projects such as Border Stories (2001/2006) and Cairo Stories (2003–11), Barry focused on the narratives of individuals from diverse cultures and their formation in relation to the politics of nation-states. Cairo Stories (Sharjah Biennial, 2011) was developed collaboratively from video interviews of more than 200 Cairene women of different social and economic classes between the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Her exhibition design draws upon diverse historical sources: the displays of El Lissitzky, the 1950s British Independent Group and 19th-century natural history museum dioramas, among others. exhibition catalogues, and art periodicals including Architect's Newspaper, Artforum, Aperture, Art & Text, The Brooklyn Rail, October, She contributed the essay "Casual Imagination" to the anthology Blasted Allegories (1987). In 1995 she received a residency in video at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and in 2016, a commission from HOME (UK). She represented the U.S. in the Cairo Biennale in 2001 and received the event's Best Pavilion award. Dia Art Foundation, Frac Lorraine, Hammer Museum, Kadist, MACBA, MUMOK, Netherlands Media Art Institute, Sammlung Goetz, and KANAL - Centre Pompidou, among others.