Sulfur Studios is pleased to present DIALOGS, a project by Stephanie Barber in the ON::View Residency at Sulfur Studios from April 9th - May 7th, 2022.
About the Project
Barber will be working on her ongoing, multidisciplinary project DIALOGS, which combines literature and video, while in residence at Sulfur Studios. She will continue writing her collection of short, poetic dialogs and will use the studio to write, edit, shoot and share these texts and videos.
Barber is interested in using non-actors for these videos, and invites visitors to Sulfur Studios to be recorded while reading her text, collaborating directly with her filmmaking. She’s interested in the conversations being legible as texts, the way a poet may read from the page and, though immersive and convincing, the audience is acutely aware of the text as object, the literary offering as distinct gesture.
In a time when America is so incredibly divided and people place their feet ever more firmly into their beliefs and ethics, Barber finds the dialog an amazing tool to bisect one’s consciousness and investigate the implications of a unidirectional stance. Though her pieces are primarily poetic and not political, this very splitting of the poetic utterance, this coming at a gesture, mood or idea from more than one (fictionalized) voice is a political act. Demoting the authority of the voice, even the imagined voice, is a step towards recognizing the multiplicity of perspectives, interpretations and lived experiences that compose human society. Through each of the dialogs this variance is championed. Not in a didactic or pedagogical way, but playfully and poignantly, moments and ideas are considered and experienced through two lenses.
About the Artist
Stephanie Barber is a writer and artist who has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media, often literary/visual hybrids that dissolve boundaries between narrative, essay and dialectic works. Her work considers the basic philosophical questions of human and non-human existence (its morbidity, profundity and banality) with play and humor.
Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally in solo and group shows at MOMA, NY; The Tate Modern, London; The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Paris Cinematheque; The Walker Art Center, MN; MOCA Los Angeles, The Wexner Center for Art, OH, among other galleries, museums and festivals.
Her videos are distributed by Video Data Bank and her films can be found at Canyon Cinema and Fandor.com. Her books Night Moves and these here separated... were published by Publishing Genius Press in 2013 and 2010 respectively. Her collection of very short stories All The People was published by Ink Press Productions in 2015. Her haiku collection Status Update Vol. 1 was published in the fall of 2019 by CTRL+P and her full length play Trial in the Woods was published by Plays Inverse in August 2021.
James Glisson at Artforum wrote "...the films of Stephanie Barber engage universal themes—time, death, memory, forgetting, frustration." and Ed Halter at Afterall Online wrote "Barber...approaches cinema as a philosophical toy, intimately small, in which the play itself generates both pleasure and insight."
Barber is currently a resident artist at The Mt. Royal MFA for Interdisciplinary Art at MICA in Baltimore, MD.
