Stephanie Barber is a multi media artist who creates meticulously crafted, odd and imaginative writing, films and videos as well as performance pieces which incorporate music, literature and video. She has had numerous screenings of her film and video work including solo shows at MoMA, NY, Anthology Film Archives, San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center, Chicago Filmmakers and The Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. Her films and videos have also been included in screenings at The New York Film Festival, Film Festival Rotterdam, The Cinematheque Francaise, The London International Film Festival, The Whitney Museum of American Art, Proekt Fabrika and the State Contemporary Art Centre (both in Moscow), The San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art and The Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art among others.
Her performances have been featured at the Baltimore Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Museum of Art, The Haggerty Museum of Art and galleries and artspaces around the world. Her most recent video/performance piece, in the jungle, premiered in May 2009 at The Stone, NYC, and has recently screened at Los Solos in Baltimore in Chicago for the closing night of the Chicago Underground Film Festival and will screen at the San Francisco Cinematheque and DC Center for the Arts in the spring of 2010.
Her book poems was published in 2006 by Bronze Skull Press and her recent book these here separated to see how they standing alone or the soundtrack to six films by stephanie barber was published in May 2008 by Publishing Genius Press. Included in this book is her experimental essay the inversion, transcription, evening track and attractor (the soundtrack for the video of the same name) which was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
The Chicago Reader wrote "Stephanie Barber ... has one of the most original visions to emerge recently from the diverse experimental film scene. Deceptively simple at first, her work is unique in the way it alters and even suspends time." and Bret McCabe at The Baltimore City Paper wrote Stephanie Barber's films "....can feel like highly formal exercises in film language made by a profoundly restless mind, playing image and sound off each other and forcing you to locate implied meanings on your own. Others are both silly and oddly engaging, involving puppets mundanely discussing pressing metaphysical concerns. And others calmly and almost imperceptibly sweep you up in the genuine breadth of their emotional wake." She currently lives in Baltimore, MD USA.
barber.s.barber@gmail.com
a short trip around, like a poem or a nostalgia for what you never had or knew anything about. we pick up speed around the equator. ANGUS MUSTANG is paralleling different travels, the physicality of travel pointed to, most clearly in the soundtrack and the pacing of the film, with the referees of travel's many orphans springing through the implied history.
1996, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
WOMAN STABBED TO DEATH is a short film concerned with both the apathy of human receptivity and the perverse nature of free floating paranoia so artfully engrained in women. it is a tiny horror film, with the soundtrack skipping blithely over the literal graves of millions and the metaphorical grave of one's feelings of safety.
1996, 16mm, b&w/so, 8.5m, $25
it's a love story, with the usual dashing figures and old habits of spelling, repetition and listing.
"In a certain way, the title tells you everything, the simplicity of S. Barber's FLOWER, THE BOY, THE LIBRARIAN is somewhat misleading in terms of its content or how the hidden poetry of those contents are discovered. The work hints at a vast space which takes the form of these three characters (the flower, the boy and the librarian) but, at the same time seems not to be fixed on these things, but to represent something else, something mysteriously luminous." - Gregg Biermann
1997, 16mm, color/so, 5m, $20
a playful and jolly look at war, illness and accidental murders. royalty and oceanic intrigue, more limbs and other body parts are removed, or floating free of their, well where they ought to be. i thought about soza boy and young private john ho, but what i made seems too pretty or abstracted, and it's funny. an unreliable narrator, perhaps, but also a woman i know who said "i'm serious about silly."
1997, 16mm, color/so, 8m, $25
a sonnet, the fifties family travel, through, say america, or time, a fascination with the exciting future, the image is purposefully jerky and toy-like with the casio keyboard beats a (faux) dated take on the serial pieces to come later. the entirely is falling apart, or so close to falling, toy machines. metamorphosis, there's not so much really put down, but a lot of pointing and elbowing.
1997, 16mm, color/so, 12m, $35
METRONOME is both the most straightforward, as well as the most difficult of my films. it is very dear to my heart. the radio play soundtrack is off-set by the intractable images "spaces." the former seems to balance precariously between kitsch and true heartrending emotion and the latter is referencing the asceticism of seventies minimalism (in experimental film) with the impenetrable intellectualism becoming increasingly moving as the film progresses. the marriage of these two elements is an odd tension, the tale of the play, the threat of limb extraction, asks the necessity of "whole and what the elements are which compose complete."
1998, 16mm, color/so, 15m, $45
it's pretty graphic, regis and his wives, the alcoholism, loneliness and misunderstandings, a stiff babe and toy computer-like scanning of the entirety, o'henry ending, resolution is delivered, that's an aria of cease.
1998, 16mm, color/so, 4m, $20
a nautical haiku of sorts.
1998, 16mm, b&w/si, 4m, $20