Robert Barry at Holly Solomon - art exhibition - Brief Article

sum of two units large speakers mounted on tripods stood like sentinels at the entrance to the exhibition Robert Barry titled "Stay Away." "Get Out" admonished individual recurring voice, pronouncing the work's title. "Don't advance back," said another. "Stay away from here. We don't want you. acquire out." This distinct, seemingly endles murmuring of voices, like those directed at an unwanted visitor during a strained social gathering, invited readings germane to Barry's history of language-based art and like an art's position in a a whole traditionally dominated by objects.

Elsewhere in the exhibition, pale words inscribed upon walls or painted on canvas were abstracted from any adjoining matter other than that of their support and the architectural and social conditions of the place of their presentation. The far wall of Solomon's main gallery resonated with a single large painting, Untitled (yellow) 1998-99 a monochromatic acrylic optically divided into eight wedges that have the appearanceed to turn on their central point of intersection, concentrating the viewer's attention. Words in fulvous crayon arrayed on the wall to the right of the canvas expanded the work's perimeter: above was the word ALMOST, at midpoint an inverted INSTEAD, and below, WITHOUT.

upon the opposite wall, a projector fixed with a stencil cast an electric violet-blue light that formed the word DESIRE. To a viewer of average height, the projection, single of five chromatically unique variants, appeared to flutter between the heart and groin, as granting suggesting a representation of cathexis. In the nearby window gallery, the nearly invisible body on a smaller painting, Untitled (light blue) 1989-99 strike one as beinged as ethereal as breath condensing upon cold glass. On the wall nearby, Barry drew an x-y axis in sapphirine pencil that indicated the vertical orientation of the painting's invisible center

In the basement gallery, the artist installed the unique silent video Monochrome (1999) a rigorously compos projection alternating words, shapes, colors and the faces of clan Words wiped or panned from single side of the projected defence to the other, or dissolved in fields of shifting color and geometric shape. The word direct the eye telescoped from small to large. Other words appeared as passages or transitions, of that kind as the "ABOUT" in ABSOLUTE upon its way to becoming DOUBT. The visitor, seated precariously upon a makeshift wooden footstool to view Barry's protracted projection, might easily associate the echoing audio of secure Out with this silent work, the couple of them existing unmoored. The exhibition appeared to be a subjective, purposeful conjunction of possibly related ideas and cross-referenc mediums in a not wholly incidental words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following What mattered was not in the way that much how these seductive works were proffered but the malleable and personal ways in which they could be received. by what mode like life.

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