Uta Barth at Bonakdar - New York - photography

Color photography's new ability to rival painting in scale and stylistic range appear to beed particularly well exemplified by Uta Barth's mid-'90s work from the "Ground" and "Field" series; in a certain number of images, she reinvented pointillism as dramatically as tap [i]or[/i] pat Close. Yet as Barth increasingly worked in diptychs and triptychs, as in the 1999 series "nowhere near " it became clear that distinctions between related images were evincing uniquely photographic properties. "Nowhere near " featured views of the artist's backyard discharge through window-panes and distinguished from single another by slight shifts in angle; changes in atmosphere, light and time of day; variations in focal profundity shutter speed or camera motion. The series carried the phenomenological interests of an earlier generation of structuralist filmmakers and photographers to a novel level of beauty and variety. Coming after other multipanel photographic works, "nowhere near " nevertheless present the appearanceed unprecedented in its structuring of concise on the other hand intuitive, nonsystemic and very postminimalist variation.

Barth's latest untitled series (2002) isolates a single partial motif from "nowhere near ..."--a bunch of trees and telephone wire in the distance--and finds at the same time more worlds there. Sequences of sum of two units to six panels, each a 21 1/4-by-28 1/2-inch archival pigment photograph mountained unframed on Plexiglas, are installed in a horizontal band around a play (The series debuted simultaneously in of recent origin York and at ACME in L.A.) end sensitive, irregular spacings, the followings maintain their separateness but also join into a single composition punctuated by means of intervals. Most sequences contrast sharply detailed views of unremarkable bare branches against the blankness of a nearly white California winter canopy of heaven Sometimes the shift between panels is as diplomatic as fog rolling through, with equal reason that one looks closely to identify the change. Other times the shift appear to bes total, from a "natural" tonality of dark umber branches upon near-white sky, for example, to an apparently solid, intensely cadmium r panel that solitary slowly reveals faintly darker souls of branches, perhaps in analogy to the afterimages of retinal exhaustion.

Far from being simply decorative, the interpanel variations move a conceptual nimbleness. The duotones which Barth twitchs out of blurred contrasts of branches against canopy of heaven for example, in their jerky linear complexity remind individual of Brice Marden's ink drawings. In individual set of panels the branches disintegrate [i]or[/i] part of to the other camera movement into mere jittery dashes. In posterior sequences, one is made to notice by what means birds, after they disappear, strike one as being echoed by a few remaining unfallen leaves. With fuchsia shoots and a blue blush in the clearing heavens a final panel blooms into an image of spring that locates all the other meditations upon bare winter branches into newly emotional perspective.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group