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Another Horizon

Stephanie Barber

2020 00:08:54 United StatesEnglishColorStereo4:316mm film

Description

The horizon, where the sky and the earth meet, is always elsewhere, a promised place where these two elements come together. A metaphor, an orienting, a promise of transition, change, transcendence. A place where the corporeal and spiritual meet, or are cleaved apart.

Another Horizon is an experimental documentary, a meeting of fact and fiction. Jayne Love reads a text I wrote for her––short sentences on the concept of the horizon and the briefest suggestion of narrative collide with pieces of Richard (Oswan) Williams' beautiful, rum-fueled living room sermons to me. I created the long scrolling collage out of found images. After filming the collage I physically scratched the horizon line out of each frame, further enunciated this space between.

I lived, for a few months, in Richard, and his wife Mary’s, apartment, the site of their Voodoo Spiritual Temple in New Orleans. Of course, as priests and priestesses Richard and Mary spoke often of death, transcendence, ethics and health. Our days were slow and filled with philosophical rumination, Richard, a brilliant old man schooling a young wandering wonderer. I recorded most everything on cassette tapes back then and some of those have made it here to the present. To this horizon we’re at now.

- Stephanie Barber

About Stephanie Barber

Stephanie Barber is an American writer and artist. She has created a poetic, conceptual and philosophical body of work in a variety of media. Many of her videos are concerned with the content, musicality and experiential qualities of language. They ferry viewers through philosophical inquiry with the unexpected oars of play, emotionalism, story, and humor. Many balance several seemingly unrelated concepts––subtly suggesting or brazenly demanding a focused and imaginative reception. Many create gently complex, emotional studies. Others are funny; a sorrowful sort of funny. There are videos of obsessive observing and ambient sounds; small artificial fireworks, animals, and silence. They are tightly wound, dense, and light simultaneously.

Barber's films and videos have has been 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 essays, stories and poems have been published in books, magazines and online journals.