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Sound - resonant frequencies of the room, repetition, distortion

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The eye can perceive the fine arts in the same way today as when they were made, whereas if music is to be experienced, it must be re-created… Each work…bears within it a future that its creator or maker cannot predict, and this gives us the right to play the music of the past

-Meylan 1988:133

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JSTOR is a digital library of academic journals, books, and primary sources.

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Introduction: Giant Mechanical Flipbook

Step 1: Pick a Partner and Collaborate

This was a collaboration with fellow Artist In Residence Iris Gottlieb. She mentioned one day in a meeting that she wanted to build an animation, but lacked the mechanical skills to make it happen. She does some really beautiful drawings, and I was conveniently looking for my next project. We took inspiration from an existing mechanical flip book, but decided to go way bigger. And metal.

Step 2: Design Using Autodesk Inventor

I have attached the model in case you would like to build this yourself. Enjoy!

This was my first chance to learn Inventor. Once we settled on a scale, I started out sketching out concepts. I was initially thinking of having a handle on the front with a 90 degree power transfer, but I decided against it because it would impede the view of the flip book and was unnecessarily mechanically complex .

I went with a knob on the side and a sprocket connecting the hand crank with the drive shaft. I realized that all the panels were going to be out of anodized aluminum, so would be quite heavy. I did some gearing calculations and decided on a 4:1 gear ratio to get maximum torque.

The design consists of a large half inch thick acrylic box, with a spindle that holds the panels in a sort of rolling cage. The spindle would be connected to a sprocket which is driven via chain from the hand crank. At the top there is a piece of plastic to hold the panels in place.

Now it was time to make the design a reality. This was my first major moving mechanical project, and an excuse to use the waterjet.

Step 3: Choosing Bearings

For the shaft, I used plastic flanged sleeve bearings to have each end sit within the acrylic and spin freely. I lathed down the ends of the 1/2 in shaft to fit a 3/8in bearing, so it would hold itself in place.

Step 4: Cutting the Parts on the Waterjet

The hardware was custom cut using Pier 9's Omax waterjet. It cuts quite well through .25in aluminum.

Step 5: Waterjet:0, Tablesaw: 1

I couldn't get the water jet to cut my bolt hole patterns. It turns out that 1/2in acrylic is a very brittle material, and there is a special setting that ramps up the pressure up slowly. I tried every possible combination of settings, but the jet kept clogging. So in the end I ended up cutting it on the table saw in 15 minutes. Since it was all done by hand, the holes had to be hand drilled as well.

Step 6: Aluminum Side Brackets

Initially, I thought a tri-corner miter would be a good idea, but it turned out to not be worth the hassle. I miscalculate the thickness of the metal and they ended up shorter on all sides.

I also didn't realize that I ordered aluminum side brackets with an inside radius, so I had to grind them out so that they would sit flush on the panels. Always learning?

Step 7: Building the Box

This was the most time-consuming part of the entire project.

The aluminum side bracket holes had to be drilled using the mill to get a precise distance between the holes. I then used the existing metal holes as a pilot to drill through the plastic. It was assembled with 8/32 machine screws.

Step 8: Assembling the Spindle Cage

The spindle resembles some sort of wacky birdcage. It holds the panels in place as they rotate. The bars were 1/8in stainless steel shaft, ordered from McMaster Carr.

Once the parts were cut on the waterjet, I drilled holes only partially through the .25in aluminum and pressed in bronze bearings. These housed the steel shaft and allowed it to rotate freely when turned.

Step 9: Inserting the Panels

Time to test it all out. The box had to be partially disassembled to insert the shaft and bearings, but it fit in quite nicely. The panels were attached using Chicago Screws. Make sure to add loc-tite to your screws or one will rattle off and cause some damage.

Step 10: ​Drive Chain

I used ANSI #25 chain, and various combinations of sprockets to get the ratio right. Here you see the attachment of the handle, and the layout of the chain. I found it's important to keep a bit of slack on the top driving portion of the chain so that it doesn't hop off. The handle mount hardware had adjustable sliders to get the perfect chain tension.

Step 11: Insert the Flapper

I chose .25in delrin because it's flexible and incredibly strong. Its purpose is to hold the top panel up and then flick the next image into place when the spindle is turned.

The depth of the flapper is critical. It has to sit at the very tip of the panels, and run perfectly parallel to the shaft.

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This was a collaboration with fellow Artist In Residence Iris Gottlieb. She mentioned one day in a meeting that she wanted to build an animation, but lacked the mechanical skills to make it happen. She does some really beautiful drawings, and I was conveniently looking for my next project.

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Introduction: Laser Cut Crankie (moving Panorama)

Crankies are small versions of moving panoramas. They usually have a long illustrated scroll wound into two spools with cranks (hence the name crankie) that you can turn to display the image through a frame. They often go together with music or narrative and they were used in theater productions as the background. Perhaps an early version of cinema.

The crankie factory website is an amazing source of inspiration that includes video and even more tutorials on how to make your own. They've been made in all sorts of sizes, including match boxes and mint tins and there are even crankie festivals.

I developed this small laser cut crankie because I wanted to make several of them and perhaps use them as a kit to teach a class. I hope you enjoy becoming a crankster by building this project. Scroll all the way to the last step to see a couple in action or check out this youtube video.

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Supplies

Besides 3mm (1/8") plywood and a laser cutter you will need the following supplies:

Glue: all purpose, wood glue or even cyanoacrylate glue (aka superglue) will work.

Pencil: we will use the graphite as lubrication for the moving parts.

Sand paper: to knock the sharp corners off the wood.

Knife: to cut strips of paper.

Step 1: Cut and Clean All the Parts.

Once you've cut the parts with the file provided below you can separate them and arrange them. Only the parts pictured are necessary to assemble the crankie.

Step 2: Glue the Crank Bearings

There are four pieces that fit on the corners of the frame. Add a little bit of glue on all the mating surfaces and fit one at a time. The laser cutter doesn't provide perfectly perpendicular edges so if you push the parts all the way they will be a little crooked, look at the pieces from the back to make sure they are perpendicular as the glue dries.

When you are done with the four bearings set it aside to let the glue dry.

Step 3: Prepare the Cranks

Start by adding one of the retainers (the circles with the square cut in the center) and push it all the way up the crank. We don't need to glue this particular one. Push the cranks into the bearings and using your pencil mark the spot where the cranks rest. Then take them out and lightly sand the edges. There is no need to make them perfectly round, we just want a smooth rotation.

If you want you can also sand the short end of the crank to make it more pleasant for your fingers. Again, no need to make it perfectly round.

Step 4: Install the Cranks

Use your pencil to rub some graphite on the wooden parts that will be in contact, that is the holes on the crank bearings and the flat surface on the retainers. Graphite is nice because unlike oil or wax it doesn't make the wood swell, it doesn't get gunky and still creates a slippery surface.

Attach the bottom retainer to the crank with a little bit of glue. As soon as you put it on the crank make sure to spin it for a little bit to make sure the motion is smooth and it's not glued in place. We want this part to move freely.

Step 5: Glue the Base

The last part of the wood assembly is to glue the base. Put some glue on the mating surfaces and assemble them. Depending on the fit you might have to use some clamps while it dries.

Step 6: Make the Scroll

Most of my scrolls are 1.5" (38 mm) wide by 22" (558 mm) long.

The length depends on the paper thickness, with regular copy paper a 17 inch to 22 inch length (43cm to 56cm) works well. Most of us have letter size paper (8.5in x 11in) lying around so you can cut 2 strips and join them together in the middle to make a long strip.

It's easier to draw the artwork before you install the scroll. In the pictures I've installed a blank scroll just for clarity.

When you are ready slide the scroll through both crank slits. Then fold a small section and glue it, or tape it in place. Then gently roll it all the way to one side, glue it on the other roll and then roll it back and forth a couple of times to let the paper adapt to it's rolled state.

It's also possible to attach the scroll without glue or tape before drawing on it. Dry fitting it this way will allow you to place marks where it starts and ends on the frame in order to know where you want the art to go.

Step 7: Done!

You are a crankster now. Go forth and decorate your crankie, put some light behind it or play with some tiny shadows. I'd love to see your creations or your student's so please share here or tag me on social media.

Cheers!

Federico

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Laser Cut Crankie (moving Panorama): Crankies are small versions of moving panoramas. They usually have a long illustrated scroll wound into two spools with cranks (hence the name crankie) that you can turn to display the image through a frame. They often go together with music or nar...

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‘The Sleeping Ghost’ by Kim Ku. Hand-painted object.

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‘Stereoscope’

148 frames of cutting and pasting moving image

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A post shared by Julia Schimautz (@juliakatarzyna_)

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‘Over Analyze’ Mixed Media
Use of colour, prints, drawings

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A post shared by Erin Wohletz (@erinwohletz)

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Combined print processes, multiple layers and colours

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A post shared by Erin Wohletz (@erinwohletz)

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Etching box

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A post shared by Tyler Printmaking BFA & MFA (@tyler_printmaking)

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Lithograph portrait, moving etching

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A post shared by Becca Swan (@blechuh)

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Pencil and ink drawing

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Monoprinted moving image.

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Charcoal animation on sheet music.

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Movement. Frames

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A post shared by Justine Kurland (@justine4good)

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Warped perspective, simple yet effective. Music created on GarageBand

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Uncanny, unsettling. 9 channel video works.

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Barry's performative films bend time and perceived reality in a laboured process of stop-motion animation that she employs to create them. In the performative film and installation.

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Qs. What’s art for? Ans: ‘To give a sense of agency in the world, both to the person making it, but through looking at it, also to viewers.’

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Do you know what you saw? - Andrew Vickery - IMMA

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Slide Film Projection. Mixed media, theatre structure, music.

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A journey by the artist aged 19, to see a performance of Wagner's 'Parsifal' in Bayreuth, and a later re-tracing of that journey, led to a series of paintings depicted in 'Do you know what you saw?' as a projected slide-show. A theatre structure functions as a threshold to another reality; the (incomplete) slide narrative is intended to prompt the imagination of the viewer, further amplified by the use of music. Vickery's deceptively simple painting technique adds to the overall air of enchantment in this piece.
The title of the work is taken from a line in the opera, which describes the disarray of a brotherhood of monks who guard the Holy Grail, and tells the tale of Parsifal, a simple innocent who eventually saves them through his quest for wisdom and compassion.

Medium

Mixed media, slides

Dimensions

120 x 85 x 50 cm (theatre)

Credit Line

IMMA Collection: Purchase, 2004

Item Number

IMMA.1659

Tags

Image Caption

Andrew Vickery, Do you know what you saw?, 2004, Mixed media, slides, 120 x 85 x 50 cm (theatre), Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2004

About the Artist

Born in Devon, Andrew Vickery now lives and works in Dublin. Vickery paints from memories of specific experiences and events to consider recurring themes of culture, nature, travel and human relationships. His deceptively simple paintings, shown as slides within miniature theatre constructions, create partial narratives which invite the viewer to become a protagonist in the work. Vickery has exhibited widely in Ireland, including solo exhibitions at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin in 2004 and 2013.
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Location

Royal Hospital Kilmainham
Dublin 8, D08 FW31, Ireland
Phone +353 1 6129900

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Do you know what you saw? - Andrew Vickery - IMMA

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A journey by the artist aged 19, to see a performance of Wagner's 'Parsifal' in Bayreuth, and a later re-tracing of that journey, led to a series of paintings depicted in 'Do you know what you saw?' as a projected slide-show. A theatre structure functions as a threshold to another reality; the (incomplete) slide narrative [...]

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Olivia Marie Fredericks ‘Traffic Mirror’

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Olivia Marie Fredericks ‘Traffic Mirror’

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Silkscreen Animation on blue pescia
16 x 20’’

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Just as people who are nearsighted can only read things close at hand, people with ADHD can only deal with things near in time

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Just as people who are nearsighted can only read things close at hand, people with ADHD can only deal with things near in time

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- Dr. Barkley

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Process, drawn animation

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Printmaking represents a kind of layered thinking that is akin to the layers in my mind

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Printmaking represents a kind of layered thinking that is akin to the layers in my mind

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- Michael Krueger (pg 11 Push Print book)

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BOMB Magazine | Light, Looking: Uta Barth

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Light, photography, influences

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Painting with light and chasing the ephemeral, Uta Barth brings us again into her Los Angeles home with new photographs that remind us not only of both the infinite and finite capacities of an eye's perception, but of one's bodily relationship with the background as well. In previous work Barth directs one's awareness inward to the subconscious engagement one has with the act of looking. What feels so different about these new images however is the presence of the artist's brushstroke-drawing attention instead to the way one can outwardly activate or interrupt a composition of space. Barth's hands sweep back her curtains as a type of performance, an introduction to one's own reflection, even. The narratives of light and its presence in life is the focal point of Barth's photographs more than ever before in these images most recently exhibited at Tanya Bonakdar gallery this winter. Here the artist opens up about her beginnings and inspirations and why she might only be able to make her artwork in Los Angeles.

Sabine Mirlesse How did you begin taking photographs?

Uta Barth I was taking a painting class in undergraduate school and wanted to render certain spatial configurations and to study the light of these imagined scenes. I did not have the skill to paint the images directly, so I started to make photographs to work from. But repeatedly I found the photographs that I thought to be the disposable source materials much more interesting and more engaging than the paintings and drawings I made from them. I also found that the process of making photographs forced me to learn how to truly see, to see the light, to study how things in an image relate to the edge, how to crop and frame the most mundane and incidental subject matter into a compelling image. I remember a teacher talking about the difference of making an engaging photograph of an ordinary thing versus making an ordinary photograph of an engaging thing. So early on I started pointing my camera at the incidental, the ordinary and the insignificant information that surrounds us but that we pass by without noticing everyday.

But that was my start with the medium; later on I began looking more to sculpture, installation work and film, and the real influences of my work came out of those disciplines . . . Robert Irwin, On Kawara, Robert Ryman-artists whose work dealt with duration like Andy Warhol ( Empire and his screen tests made in the mid '60s) and John Cage (who understood that, in order to talk about silence, you need to bracket it with sound). I was deeply engaged by the ideas of minimalism and much of the work from the Light and Space movement. So, while my influences are not really found within the history of photography, I still continued to work with a camera. I wanted to make work about looking, about visual perception as content in and of itself. As the camera lens functions much like the human eye, photography seemed the most appropriate medium for those interests.

SM Were you always interested in making images about images themselves?

UB I think my very early work was much about that. I wanted to rethink what we take for granted in an image, to examine how images make meaning and how to break out of the traditional way of making a photograph. Mostly the camera is used as a sort of pointing device. One goes out into the world and points it at something of beauty, something of importance, a spectacle of some sort . . . always at something, so in most images the subject of the photograph and the meaning are one and the same. I wanted to challenge that by removing the central subject and to look at and think about the background, which ascribes meaning to the subject in an almost subliminal way.

SM Do you have a favorite piece of music?

UB In 1983 Brian Eno made an album titled Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. It has the sweetest liner notes, written by him about his memory of watching the Apollo space mission on TV when he was young. He was captivated by the imagery and the idea of what he was witnessing, yet found the experience undermined by the reporter's narration and bad resolution on a small TV screen. Therefore he wanted to create an ambient soundtrack that might match up to what he imagined the experience of floating weightlessly through space might be. The album has no lyrics and is incredibly beautiful, and the very idea of ambient music relates so much to things I think about in my own work.

SM What is something you love about living in Los Angeles? Something you detest? What about Europe?

UB I find Los Angeles to be the most alienating city I have ever been to. I assume it is because of the endless sprawl, the distances one needs to cover to see a friend, the relentless traffic and the complete lack of pedestrian space.

When I land in New York, within an hour or two, I have run into several people I know on the sidewalk. In LA we plan and re-plan to meet up on some distant day. I live here because the man I was with is from here, and he never wanted to leave. I did not mind it here, but when we separated I realized that I live in a place I never chose and now I constantly plot to move away. I miss Europe very much, as I still feel like a foreigner here. Yet when I am in Europe I feel like a tourist.

There is a freedom in LA that is essential to making art. The place has such a short history compared to New York, London, or Berlin. So as an artist I am not weighed down by the past that I feel so viscerally in New York or London for example. This place still has the sense of being the last frontier; there are few ghosts to contend with. The discourse here is generated around the many excellent art schools, and it is challenging. Most every serious artist here teaches, not just for a job, but to be engaged.

I honestly do miss Europe terribly, and this feeling is getting stronger as I get older. So I did spend much time plotting to move to London or other parts of the UK, but it is hard to uproot your life at some stage. In my twenties I moved to Los Angeles without knowing a single person here and never gave it a second thought, but now it is more difficult to pull up my roots for something unknown. And most importantly, I cannot picture myself making work somewhere else; there is a reason that the Light and Space movement happened in LA. The light is visceral and blinding here. The wide open sprawl of one city turning into the next is so vast, so seemingly endless . . . and all that is bordered by the ocean on one side and the wide, incredibly beautiful desert on the other. I do deeply like the vastness of it all.

SM In a 1996 interview for the Journal of Contemporary Art, you state that a priority of yours is "to make the viewer aware of his or her own activity of looking at something." You've elaborated upon this idea here by stating visual perception to be the actual content of your photographs. Why is the act of looking so important to you?

UB When I got out of graduate school, I did a lot of soul-searching about what I wanted my work to be. It was the height of postmodernism, and much work around me seemed to be illustrating the theory we were all reading then. Much work dealt with political ideas, examined media, addressed gender and identity politics, and sought to deconstruct the politics of the gaze. I do have deep political and sociopolitical convictions, but I do not find the art world to be the best place to exercise them. I am much more politically effective when I act in the political arena. The gallery and museum certainly also can be an arena for these ideas, but it's a place in which we most likely find ourselves preaching to the choir. Since political change is so hard to affect and slow to take hold, I feel that I should find the most expedient way to do this, and artwork for me is not the most effective language for this. So I came to the conviction that art, for me, needed to address its most essential attributes and that is its ability to deeply engage the visual.

For my whole career, I wanted to think about not only what we see, but also how we see and thereby make visual perception the central focus of my investigation. Every project I have made has taken a different stab at the same question. I want the viewer to become immersed in looking and self-conscious of looking for its own sake. The title of Robert Irwin's biography is Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees. Before it became this perfect title for his ideas, it was a line in a Zen text. Much like Heidegger, Zen asks us to engage deeply in every moment and in what we experience to the point that we loose track of the story or the narrative that the mind wants to generate about any particular thing. My hope is that my work engages the ephemeral, the ambient, and the most subliminal information of everyday life. I make images that trace light and they render duration, trace time, and give you no central subject that will distract you. My ultimate hope is that you as the viewer become self-conscious of your activity of looking at the work and that once you leave the museum space this is something that you can carry with you into your world. Every project I have made has a different strategy for doing this, but the intention is always the same.

SM You mentioned that every project you've made takes a different stab at the same question of how one engages in the act of looking for its own sake and visual perception of time and space. Do you think that most artists work that way, whether they realize it or not? Is it important to dedicate oneself to the exploration of a single idea and come at it from various angles to further open it and unpack it?

UB Yes. I think every Dostoevsky novel, every Hemingway book, or Joan Didion piece is about the same central ideas throughout their careers. I think serious artists repeatedly engage the same central questions, but this should not be confused with a consistent style. I am always excited when a change of signature style opens new doors for exploring a core idea.

SM In that same interview [in the Journal of Contemporary Art], you explain how the use of blur in your images, like in Gerhard Richter's, exists as a device to remove specificity of place and time. You also talk about how it is used to try to imply the information not depicted, the gaze of the camera being elsewhere outside of the plane of focus-could you speak a bit more about where this gaze might otherwise lie?

UB People often refer to my work as "out of focus" and I always counter that it is perfectly in focus, the camera just happens to be focused on an unoccupied point in space. So I am photographing the volume of a room instead of its walls, the atmosphere of a rainstorm instead of the landscape the rain falls on. The visual residue of making images this way is the unfocused walls and blurred street scenes. What we end up looking at is the ground of the figure/ground relationship, the background, the envelope of information that might provide the context for who or whatever could occupy the point of focus. In my early work, I was interested in thinking about how this envelope of information would create the context and meaning for what we see. This lack of focus happens in the human eye much the way it does for the camera, but our eyes are always darting about and constructing a seamless scene. If you try hard to hold the focus on one point and pay attention to the background of that, you will see it falls out of focus, just like my images do. The photograph just allows me to freeze looking into deep space.

SM Could you speak a little bit about these new photographs recently exhibited at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery?

UB The show consisted of two projects: . . . and to draw a bright white line with light and Compositions of Light on White. In each project I stop being just the observer of light, as it spills into the house and moves through it in the course of the day. Here I have become a participant in creating these images of light by drawing the curtain or drawing the shades in a different room. In the first project, I am moving the curtain to change the formation of a line of light that starts out being razor-thin and over the hours grows into a thick band of light. In the second series, I arrange the blinds to make Mondrian-like geometric abstractions out of light. This project can only be photographed for a few days each year, days in which the projecting sunlight is perfectly perpendicular to the geometry of lines of my closet doors. So I am literally drawing with light. Liz Siegel at the Art Institute of Chicago wrote a text for my exhibition there in which she points out that the translation, the literal meaning of the word photography is: "to write or draw with light." This is something I knew but had forgotten about. So these images are photographs in the most literal way.

SM You've been teaching at the University of California for a while now-is there any particular point of view or philosophy that you try to encourage in your students?

UB I recently left my full-time University position to be in the studio more. But I instantly missed teaching and now spend a few days per term teaching graduate critique at Art Center. I think the most important thing I know about teaching, I learned from Robert Heinecken when I was a graduate student at UCLA. He had a way of taking my work as serious or even more seriously that I could myself. He engaged in my ideas with great attention and thereby gave me the self-confidence to take my own work to be meaningful and to invest myself fully. It taught me to set the bar very high. After years of teaching, I know how to do that for students, and I also know how to teach them how to develop a dialog with their own work, to get the work to speak back to them and to build ideas from the last to the next instead of jumping around when they hit the block in the road. The last thing I learned from Joan Didion. In a passage about her own writing process she talks about writing a novel being like walking a tightrope and the trick is to never look down. Well, we always look down and that is when you need a safety net. For an artist that net is the continual act of keeping a notebook of images and ideas. This way, when you fall, and we all fall, all of the time, you have something to go to that gives you back the track of thought and the history and development of your own ideas.

SM That's crazy you should mention Joan Didion because I've often imagined your imagery when reading her and vice-versa-especially Play It as It Lays. Both of you are transplants from other cities that have lived with, loved, and struggled through Los Angeles and represented a certain quality of its vastness, its isolation, its oasis, its reverie, its alienation . . .

UB For the Phaidon Contemporary Artist monograph books, each artist is asked to choose a piece of writing that is meaningful to their work. Everyone before me had used various relevant theoretical texts, but I choose selections of edits I made from Joan Didion's novel Democracy. I have read her repeatedly for as long as I can remember and find her the most atmospheric writer I know.

SM Name one thing you know now that you wish you'd known as a young artist just starting out.

UB After each and every exhibition I have ever done, and there are very many by now, I feel totally convinced that I will never have another idea. This is true for me to this day, but I know now that it always passes and that most every artist and writer I know, who is not satisfied by repeating themselves, feels the same way.

SM What is next for you?

UB This spring I will do a solo show with Galeria Elvira González in Madrid. Aside from that I have started on a project titled In the light and shadow of Morandi. I am fascinated by his work, by his relentless repetition of the same subject matter, in order to talk about composition and painting itself. I share this fascination and this use of repetition in much of my own work. So I am playing around with these repetitive still lifes, but I am only photographing the shadows they cast. I want the image to be deferred, and as in the recent projects, I want to draw with light, the refraction of light as it moves through glass and liquids, to draw with shadow, and again, to use light as the subject in and of itself.

SM That makes me think of the series called From My Window by André Kertész . . . do you look at him at all?

UB I think more about a Robert Frank photograph I love. It is part of The Americans and is a view from a widow onto the rooftops of the town. He moved the camera back to include the curtains of the window he is looking out of and thereby moved the attention to himself as the onlooker, rather than just the scene itself. It is a small move, yet it totally changes the reading of the image. I have used that same move in much of my work.
Uta Barth's new work was exhibited for the first time at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York City from October 27th through December 22nd, 2011.

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BOMB Magazine | Light, Looking: Uta Barth

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Painting with light and chasing the ephemeral, Uta Barth brings us again into her Los Angeles home with new photographs that remind us not only of both the infinite and finite capacities of an eye's perception, but of one's bodily relationship with the background as well.

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ADHD creates a blindness to time or, to be more accurate, a nearsightedness to the future

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ADHD creates a blindness to time or, to be more accurate, a nearsightedness to the future

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- Dr. Barkley

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Uta Barth at The Art Institute of Chicago

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Light, ephemeral, perception

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Uta Barth's new photographic series " . . . and to draw a bright white line with light," 2011, subtly departs from her previous bodies of work, two of which, "white blind (bright red)," 2002, and "Sundial," 2007, are also on view in this exhibition. Barth's photographs are composed of elements that are normally relegated to a composition's background-the blanched sky, barren trees, and telephone lines of the "white blind (bright red)" series, for example, or the hanging lamp, mustard-colored sofa, and light-filled window of "Sundial." Although her images rarely include people, as of late Barth has begun to register her own presence in, and impact on, a photographed scene. This most recent series marks the first time that Barth has overtly manipulated the physical elements of a setting in order to achieve specific ends. Two of the photographs show the artist's hands gently pulling the folds of a diaphanous curtain so as to lengthen or contract a squiggly line of light cast on it by the afternoon sun.

As Barth guides this single beam into robust waves and lyrical flourishes, her hands call attention to the light's almost palpably sculptural qualities as well as to her own role in shaping its form. The outline of a windowsill provides each composition with a stable horizon that runs evenly across the entire series of photographs. Sometimes the light dips below the sill line to hover in the darker area beneath; at other times it ripples above or across it. Whereas "Sundial" depicts light's cyclical relation to the passage of time, " . . . and to draw a bright white line with light" explores the range of possibilities that a singular moment and a particular manifestation of light affords, all through the most elegantly minimal of gestures-a simple tug.

- Claudine Ise

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Uta Barth at The Art Institute of Chicago

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Uta Barth's new photographic series " . . . and to draw a bright white line with light," 2011, subtly departs from her previous bodies of work, two of which, "white blind (bright red)," 2002, and "Sundial," 2007, are also on view in this exhibition.

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Kamishibai inspired. Colour pencil stop-motion animation

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People with ADHD cannot deal with time—that includes looking back and looking ahead, to get ready for what’s coming at you. So the individual with ADHD is kind of living in the now

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People with ADHD cannot deal with time—that includes looking back and looking ahead, to get ready for what’s coming at you. So the individual with ADHD is kind of living in the now

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- Dr. Barkley

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Time-based prints. Woodcut

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Erasure, scanning, morphing, story

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30 frames - CMYK riso animation

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