The shadow playlets Rosa Barba creates with film-projection technology may be littered with references to the past (from Plato’s cave to the conspiracy culture of post-war America), but they collectively convey an acutely relevant investigation into the contemporary data encounter. The literary text cut from felt and hanging at the gallery entrance describes an imaginary encounter with objects and ephemera as if swept clean of associative cobwebs.
It’s clear, however, from the way Barba harnesses the authoritative energy of machinic processes in this installation of projected films, artworks and props that this is part of a grand design to loosen one’s preconceptions of (technologically mediated) reality. The term ‘time-based’ is certainly turned on its head here as half the buzzing bits of kit project empty screens of light, operate as humanoid props or cast shady evidence of real-time activity.
There’s a ‘Mad Men’-seductive quality to the display, given the retro nature of the equipment, sound production and main film work, which explores the Robert Smithson-esque topography of a Mojave-desert racetrack. And Barba works the contradictory nature of appearances to full-effect with ‘Stating the Real Sublime’ (comprised of a 16mm projector and a square cut out of the smoky vinyl covering the gallery glass), where real life is framed as cinema and the theatre of the moving image reduced to the sum of an object’s parts. It’s this melding of artistic sensbilities and the formal edge to Barba’s curation of ideas in space that prevent one falling out of the referential net into some familiar brand of flux.