Uta Barth Homage

Kathy Van Torne

In Homage To...

Uta Barth

Deceptively simple, Uta Barth's photographic works question the traditional functions of pictures and our expectations of them. By photographing in ordinary anonymous places - in simple rooms, city streets, airports and fields - Barth uses what is natural and unstudied to shift attention away from the subject matter, and redirect focus to a consciousness of the processes of perception and the visceral and intellectual pleasures of seeing. Her interiors and landscapes engage the viewer in an almost subliminal way, testing memory, intellect and habitual responses. Narrative subject matter is replaced with visual incident; the ambiguity of the pictures stimulates a profound self-consciousness of the act of looking. Never entirely abstract, landscapes and interiors are made visually ambiguous to spur profound examination of the particular ways we come to expect pictures to affect us.

Barth has worked in her own house, recording sequences of light through windows and across floors and walls to create pictures that emulate pure, undirected observation. Works in all the series - which range from small easel-size pieces, to works of billboard proportions - begin in the physicality of vision and explore the differences between looking at the world and being conscious of that looking.

Source: The Artist's Org