As if I needed any further reasons to be a fan of Colleen Barry’s work, the concept of her solo that opens tomorrow at Half Gallery in NYC won me in an instant. Thinking about iconoclasm, as the destruction of imagery with political or religious undertones, and iconophilia, the worship of images, the work explores "entering a new era of iconoclasm with mistrust and inundation of visuals driven by technology.”
The reason why this resonates with me is that, as parents of (pre)teens, we have both witnessed a rapid shift in how new generations are exposed to visual content on their screens (it also helps that the theme is explored through the alchemy of Baroque-like painterly oomph). In particular, the way AI is establishing its voice and presence, and how they/we’re responding to it. Only a couple of weeks ago, I realized that anything a young kid sees on screen and can’t explain or contextualize, they will label as AI. And while it's great that they're aware of its trickery, this phenomenon removes any need to examine, critique, or learn from new experiences. As I understood it, a similar notion prompted Barry to use the medium of painting, along with its history and legacy, to explore how we create, read, or understand borders between the real and the generated, the valid and the bogus.
And to do this, Barry took a very primitive, somewhat pagan approach to assembling and contrasting otherwise unrelated images or icons into a seemingly harmonious and logical whole. By doing so, she's attributing new qualities to existing characters or completely fabricating new narratives around them using existing clues. Occasionally using the split-screen format to reference the contemporary nature of her research and painterly mastery to validate them, she’s commenting on how much things have shifted and changed in front of our eyes. But even more so, she's making it obvious how easily we're pushed on the thin line—tricked into believing while simultaneously being assured that these are mere speculations. As nicely summed up in the exhibition text, "Barry underscores how easily perception hardens into belief, how illusion becomes doctrine.“ —Saša Bogojev
