About stephanie
Barber’s films and videos have screened nationally and internationally… more
DAREDEVILS 2013
HD 85minutes
This feature film premiered October, 2013 at New York Film Festival's Views from the Avant-Garde.
A portrait of risk and language, the experimental narrative DAREDEVILS, presents a writer as she interviews a well-known artist and feels the reverberations of their discussion throughout her day. Visually spare, still and verbose, the video considers three formal handlings of language—a dialog, two monologues and a song.
Starring KimSu Theiler, Flora Coker & Adam Robinson and featuring the voices of Susan Howe and Jenny Graf, DAREDEVILS constructs a metaphor of an artist’s life and work as daredevilry.
The piece sits gently between video art, narrative and poetic essay. The classic rising action, climax and denouement are sculpted, not by cause and effect, but by the subtle movements to and from understanding that are inherent in conversation. Bubbles of intimacy are blown and popped, begin to be blown again.
website: http://daredevilsmovie.com/
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DAREDEVILS trailerThe trailer for the new feature DAREDEVILS written and directed by Stephanie Barber.
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DAREDEVILS still, interview sceneActor Flora Coker plays an artist who is interviewed by a writer played by KimSu Theiler.
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EXCERPT FROM DAREDEVILS INTERVIEW SCENEThis is a short excerpt from the first scene of DAREDEVILS. The Writer, played by KimSu Theiler, interviews the fictional artist played by Flora Coker about her work and life and ideas. The script is carefully constructed to suggest an initial awkwardness as the conversation begins, and then move to the traditional question/answer format of an interview to moments of natural conversational exchanges to an abrupt ending.
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DAREDEVILS still, jogging sceneActor KimSu Theiler in the jogging scene. This second scene, after the interview, watches The Writer jog while listening to a podcast interview with a daredevil and hollywood stunt actor.
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DAREDEVILS reviewed at Cinema Scope Magazinehttp://cinema-scope.com/features/conversation-stephanie-barbers-daredevils/
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NYFF, Views from the Avant-Garde ReviewsReview of DAREDEVILS Nov. 2013, at Lumiere Magazine http://www.elumiere.net/exclusivo_web/nyff13/nyff13_09.php
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Notes on DaredevilsReview of DAREDEVILS at The Brooklyn Rail, Nov. 2013 http://www.brooklynrail.org/2013/11/film/notes-on-daredevils
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shooting actor Adam Robinson as 'The Musician' in DAREDEVILSDirector Stephanie Barber setting up one of the recording scenes in which Adam Robinson plays the role of a musician recording the sounds of branches, logs, rocks and leaves.
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DAREDEVILS still, woods recordingActor Adam Robinson, whose character is in the woods recording sounds for a song his character composes. These recording scenes are sprinkled throughout the film and interrupt the 3 main scenes.
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DAREDEVILS still, dance sceneActor Kimsu Theiler in final dance scene of DAREDEVILS. The writer, played by KimSu Theiler, returns home after a long day and dances in the backyard. Her dance moves between silly and sublime, sorrowful and joyful. After jogging The Writer returns home where The Musician is recording the vocal track for a song he has made with his recordings in the woods. “Hey birds, will you all fly away? Hey birds, will you all fly away? or just nestle, further down nestle further down?...” The song is repetitive and contemplative and The Writer watches him sing for a short while and then goes into the back yard (where the music changes from diegetic to non-diegetic) and dances a dance of wonder, futility, joy, sorrow & surrender on the nighttime lawn of an American home.
All The People 2015
The stories sit carefully between poetry and story. Like much of my work, they are interested in the upsetting of genre and media as an element of the project. All The People wants to be a book of photographs, an album of songs or treatise on need.
Laura van den Berg at Entropy Magazine wrote "All the People is a work that resists easy categorization, and certainly Barber is stretching and complicating the form of the micro-story or the flash fiction or whatever we want to call it here; she is capturing that form and making it wholly her own. I could try out comparisons—Deb Olin Unferth meets Lydia Davis, say—but Stephanie Barber continues to prove herself as a true original."
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ALL THE PEOPLE cover.jpgALL THE PEOPLE is a collection of very short stories which the press Ink Press Productions published in 2015.
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Whale Watchers from ALL THE PEOPLEThe 43rd story from ALL THE PEOPLE.
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I've Become Lost to the World from ALL THE PEOPLE.jpegIn this short story a man contemplates his lover's depression as he walks home from the train.
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The Adirondacks from ALL THE PEOPLEA young girl thinks about the groundskeeper at her family's summer home. ALL THE PEOPLE is an attempt to give voice to many different americans from diverse ages, races, classes and genders.
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image bomb magazine all the people.pngThis interview between Laura van den Berg and I at BOMB magazine about the publication of ALL THE PEOPLE.
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all the people at atticus review.png
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ALL THE PEOPLE authors note.jpegThis is an author's note at the end of the book. A bit of a mission statement, though still playful.
jhana and the rats of james olds or 31 days/31 videos 2011
Between June 25th-Aug. 7th 2011 Stephanie Barber moved her studio into the Baltimore Museum of Art where she created a new video each day in a central gallery open to museum visitors.
Jhana is a meditative state and James Olds is the protoneuroscientist who discovered the pleasure or reward center of the human brain by doing experiments on rats.
The goal of this project, entitled jhana and the rats of james olds or 31 days/31 videos, was to create a series of short, poetic videos in the playful and serious footprints of Oulipo games and daily meditations; creating one new video each day. The exhibit was both a constantly changing installation as well as a collaborative performance in which museum visitors were present as spectator and often creative partner. Each of these videos was created on one of the exhibition days.
"I am thinking about the emphasis given to product over production, or display over creation. The piece is a video screening and an installation and a performance; a spiritual obeisance, an athletic braggadocio, a consideration of marxist theories of production (with the assembly line so lovingly lit). It is a funny game for me to play, an exercise in concentration, discipline and focus, an extension of my everyday. It is a greedy desire to squeeze a massive amount of work out of myself; a dare; a show I would like to see myself. It is like the back story before the story, an inversion of the way we usually experience art work. A moving from the inside out.
I was thinking how the interiors of museums are really only able to share what is almost the exterior of a piece of art work, and though this colliding of the interior and exterior is fuzzy, a step towards the interior of any art piece might be the making of that piece. I'm interested in the tedious and repetitive qualities of meditation and art work, the difference and similarities in these two practices. The practice and work of these practices??the dispelling of the so-seductive myth of artist as creating through a vague and florid explosion of inspiration??or perhaps interested in romanticizing the effort and challenging technical, logistical, practical elements of creation. The tedious as IT. Or one of the ITs. Like all pieces of art, this project is accordion in its intentions, shrinking and expanding upon use." Stephanie Barber
Press on jhana and the rats of james olds can be found here:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2011/07/a-film-a-day-for-sondheim-prize-finalist-stephanie-barber-at-the-baltimore-museum-of-art/
http://citypaper.com/arts/visualart/finalist-words-1.1171218
http://thefastertimes.com/writersonwriting/2011/07/13/almost-everyone-is-ready-stephanie-barber/
http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/stephanie-barber-works-at-a-museum/
http://www.examiner.com/arts-in-baltimore/poetry-of-the-sondheim-artscape-prize-at-the-bma
http://publishinggenius.blogspot.com/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/exhibits/sondheim-artscape-prize-2011-finalists,1209266/critic-review.html
http://charmcitycurrent.com/bolger/2011/07/08/sondheim-artscape-prize-exhibition-a-work-in-progress/
http://www.baltimorefishbowl.com/stories/be-a-part-of-art-with-stephanie-barbers-31-days-31-videos/
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still from The Party
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(small piece of) I LOVE YOUThis is a short excerpt from a 50 minute film in which 689 people say "I Love You" one after another. All the people in the piece were passing through the exhibit and agreed to be in this piece.
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jhana and the rats of james olds written about at The National Poetry Foundation blog Harrietjhana and the rats of james olds written about at The National Poetry Foundation blog Harriet
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miniaturesStephanie Barber | U.S. | 2011 | 2m color | sound | DV from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds A series of sentences read by museum visitors inspired by, and paired with, a number of miniature Elizabethan portraits. Words and paintings??each seem equally able and unable to represent a life. The man who reads the line ?I think constantly about my coming demise? came through the exhibition several times and participated in a few different pieces. He is big, young, strong and confident. I had him read the line many times before he got it just right. I think it was hard for him to imagine a worry of this sort.?Stephanie Barber
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at-the-shore.png
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still from The Badger and The HareA musical telling of an old chinese myth. Made in collaboration with Smelling Salt Amusements.
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DEGAS from Jhana and the Rats of James OldsDEGAS from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds 1 min / digital / sound / 2011 It is not only that his first and last names are near anagrams of each other or that his paintings of horses are paintings of motion reorganized to suggest docility and submission, earth toned to make the colored silks of riders pop. There is more about Degas that gives us pleasure. More than Degas I am continually fascinated by what passes for biography–a timeline; a portrait; a solemn or inane anecdote. These all seem equally plausible. Like all the pieces I made for Jhana and the Rats of James Olds this piece was read by a woman who came into the museum unaware that she would help me finish and become a part of my work that day. Between June 25th-Aug. 7th 2011 Stephanie Barber moved her studio into the Baltimore Museum of Art where she created a new video each day in a central gallery open to museum visitors.
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Some Animals from Jhana and the Rats of James Oldsh.264SOME ANIMALS from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds is a song created by the presence or absence of these images of animals. The patterning of sound sound sound repeating like the shapes which make a giraffe's coat or the molecules of steam which flow from the bison's broad nose as he exhales the scent of a wildflower. Between June 25th-Aug. 7th 2011 Stephanie Barber moved her studio into the Baltimore Museum of Art where she created a new video each day in a central gallery open to museum visitors. The goal of this project, entitled jhana and the rats of james olds or 31 days/31 videos, was to create a series of short, poetic videos in the playful and serious footprints of Oulipo games and daily meditations; creating one new video each day. The exhibit was both a constantly changing installation as well as a collaborative performance in which museum visitors were present as spectator and often creative partner.
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the eclipse from jhana and the rats of james oldsTHE ECLIPSE Stephanie Barber | U.S. | 2011 | 2m | b&w | silent | DV from Jhana and the Rats of James Olds The solar eclipse of May 28 in 1900 is part of the Saros Cycle 126. It was, as all eclipses are, not a result of any more or less motion but an expected interruption along our usual path. A shading that reminds us that we are moving and that other celestial objects are moving also.
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at the baths from jhana and the rats of james olds
Night Moves 2013
The book is a collection of thoughts and conversations about Bob Seger's classic song of the same name, all culled from YouTube.
Poignant, disturbing and incisive, the collection deepens and takes on a cultural significance beyond the initial artistic impetus. A collaboration is created—twisting through the nostalgia for youth and the collective ownership of pop music, the book becomes a moving document of how strangers communicate about art, and what the song and the sentiment of the song means to different people.
Carl Wilson at Slate Magazine wrote "It’s in these alternations between poignancy and repugnance, the tender and the foul-mouthed, the clichés and the arresting confessions, separated by bubbles of white space, that Barber discovers the poetry of the comment section. Her gesture here goes back, of course, to Marcel Duchamp and all the conceptual art since that has been produced by putting a frame around a found object. (She often collages found images into her video work as well.)" about Night Moves.
Blake Butler at Vice Magazine wrote "The anonymous and wide-open freedom, when orchestrated under independent Baltimore filmmaker Stephanie Barber’s eye, quickly culminates into a narrative built from sentimental dedications, troll-bait insults, wistful old folks angry over how music has changed, defensive teens, lurkers, hornballs, the incredulous, the sincere, and a whole other range of personalities that would only intersect with one another online."
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Night Moves by Stephanie BarberPublished by Publishing Genius Press in February 2013.
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Stephanie Barber interviewed by Mike Pesca about her book Night Moves.Oct. 14, 2014, Stephanie Barber interviewed by Mike Pesca at The Gist. listen here: https://soundcloud.com/thegist/working-on-our-night-moves-2 Book interview begins at 11'45"
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Night Moves reviewed at Los Angeles Review of BooksGina Vaynshteyn reviews Night Moves at Los Angeles Review of Books, July 2013.
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Night Moves reviewed at HTMLGiantNight Moves reviewed by Melissa Broder at HTMLGiant
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Night Moves reviewed at City PaperBret McCabe reviews Night Moves at the Baltimore City Paper.
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Night Moves review from Vice MagazineBlake Butler reviews 3 conceptual books released in 2013 at Vice Magazine. http://www.vice.com/read/conceptual-gender-violence-murder-and-bob-seger
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Night Moves reviewed at Slate MagazineCarl Wilson reviews Night Moves at Slate Magazine. Nov. 2013.
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2 pages- Night Moves.jpeg2 pages from the conceptual book Night Moves.Night Moves is recognition and celebration of a very ubiquitous collaborative critical inquiry that is happening on YouTube or any online community where people share and comment and discuss in a public way. It is a recognition and celebration of the very tenuous (at turns beautiful or cruel) nature of democratic discourse with all its wonders and perversions on display.
Status Update Vol. 1 2019
In 2019 the press Ctrl+P published this first year of haiku and their accompanying drawings.
FROM Ctrl+P:
Stephanie Barber has been posting haiku to her Facebook page every day since 2010. Status Update Volume I is a catalog of that first year, at once quotidian and monumental. Archived in the endless scroll of Facebook’s feed, here they are extracted from the jumble of news articles, events, and comments and available to the public for the first time. Each haiku has been paired with an illustration by Lauren Bender, which are not illustrations at all, but rather descriptions of drawings she would do if she were to illustrate each haiku. As the cultural role of Facebook ebbs and flows, Barber persistently responds to the platform’s incessant query, “What’s on your mind?”
Ctrl+P is a curatorial + publishing project dedicated to preserving ephemeral + poetic interventions in the digital realm. It is a platform for thinking + a chance to collaborate with artists + writers.
BUST CHANCE
the audience's engagement with the smallest subtleties and less than (usually considered) spectacular elements of theater is impressive and speaks volumes on the patience and acuity of modern viewers. their finely tuned sense of humor and rapt and continuous focus warms the cynics' icy exterior. likewise, the feedback loop of mutual artistic understanding and respect from the performing elements and receptive viewers, and back again, fortifies those who wish to love art and believe it must have revolutionary value. all are satisfied and feel good in the showing of satisfaction.
BUST CHANCE was originally created in 2008 for Light Industry's memorial show for Bruce Conner during which I performed a live soundtrack with several musicians. The film was completed as a self contained piece which premiered at the 2010 New York Film Festivals Views from the Avant-Garde and has since screened at The Rotterdam International Film Festival, EX-IS Korea, Onion City Festival and Migrating Forms NYC among others.
A small bit of this piece can be viewed at VDB: http://www.vdb.org/titles/bust-chance
Lawn Poem
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Lawn PoemThis is an installation shot from a Lawn Poem I installed at Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's project space in Northern Wisconsin named The Poor Farm.
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still from essay FOR A LAWN POEMread the book here: http://issuu.com/publishinggenius/docs/barber
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still from essay FOR A LAWN POEMread the book here: http://issuu.com/publishinggenius/docs/barber
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Baltimore UrbaniteArticle about the installation at the Baltimore Urbanite.
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Oh My Sod!Article about the installation in HTMLGiant. http://htmlgiant.com/author-news/oh-my-sod-stephanie-barbers-lawn-poem/
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Poetry for Bare FeetArticle about Stephanie Barber's installation in the Utne Reader. http://www.utne.com/arts/lawn-poetry-for-bare-feet-stephanie-barber.aspx
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Lawn Poem detailThis is an installation shot from a Lawn Poem I installed at Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's project space in Northern Wisconsin named The Poor Farm.
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Lawn PoemThis is an installation shot from a Lawn Poem I installed at Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's project space in Northern Wisconsin named The Poor Farm.
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Lawn Poem detailThis is an installation shot from a Lawn Poem I installed at Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's project space in Northern Wisconsin named The Poor Farm.
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Journal Sentinel Review of The Poor Farm in Manawa WIfrom an article by Mary Louise Schumacher on the Great Poor Farm Experiment at Michelle Grabner and Brad Killam's exhibition space in Northern Wisconsin. http://www.jsonline.com/news/wisconsin/52921762.html
dwarfs the sea 2009
dwarfs the sea is an experimental video composed of a series of found photographs and imagined texts written about the subjects of the video.
Small biographies and musing generalizations--men's relations to each other and their lives. There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and fro like the rocking of a ship.
James Glisson, at ArtForum wrote "In dwarfs the sea, black-and-white photographs of crew members appear and the digital narrator gives snippets of their lives: “Oh him, he had problems sleeping,” or, regarding a ship’s navigator, “Barely awake, he would begin an internal dialogue of failure.” Holding saccharine melodrama at bay, the affectless and antiseptic tone paradoxically grants each photograph and story a tinge of emotional identification."
A small bit of this piece can be viewed at VDB: http://www.vdb.org/titles/dwarfs-sea
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a still from dwarfs the seaA still from the video dwarfs the sea. A series of still photographs or men and imagined biographies told through a disembodied voice.
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dwarfs the sea and other videos written about at artforum
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dwarfs the sea, stillA still from the video dwarfs the sea. A series of still photographs or men and imagined biographies told through a disembodied voice.
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dwarfs the sea excerptA short excerpt from the 8 minute single channel video 'dwarfs the sea'. I found this collection of photographs and tried to imagine who these men might be, if they knew each other, what sort of work they did. My own short time working on a sailboat as an AB in the North Sea has given me a love and romanticization for the sailors life. Small biographies and musing generalizations––men’s relations to each other and their lives. There is hope and loneliness, companionship and isolation and the simplest of filmic elements to contrast the complexity of human emotions. The delicacy of the formalist writing moves the listener from intimacy to universalism and back again, swaying gently to and fro like the rocking of a ship.
Horizon 2014
The 16mm footage was shot by a wealthy American couple on their 3 year, around the world honeymoon trip. My mother was their maid for 25 years until they passed away recently and I received all of the film footage. I constructed this collage which contemplates the concept of utopia and holds a critique of the American class system and the way it is visible through markers such as language usage.
While the last 7 years I have been creating feature films and expanding my notions of cinematic time, short, experimental, poetic film and video work has been a mainstay of my artistic practice and I have and will continue to create these more condensed pieces throughout my life.
Horizon premiered at The New York Film Festival and has since screened at The Edinburgh Film Festival; KLEX, Kuala Lampur; Fronteira Festiva, Brazil; Manchester Film Festival and others.
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Horizon, stillStill of the short, poetic film "Horizon" made in 2014.
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horizon still
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horizonA brief poetic collage of 16mm home movie footage from Egypt in the 1950s along with elements of Capra's Lost Horizon soundtrack interwoven with recordings of a small and frustrated boy. The original footage was given to me by my mother, who worked some 30 years as a maid for the millionaire couple who shot this while on a 4 year, around-the-world honeymoon trip. The woman’s voice pondering utopia, peace and joy; the small boy frustrated by the tonal and linguistic romanticism of this expression, the implications of class inherent in 'utopia' and the trappings of such a discourse.