STEVEN BARIS

These newest artworks were created under mental duress—no doubt a similar kind of duress felt by anyone inhabiting this seemingly endless saga of unprecedented social, political, and ecological upheavals. The Toppling series offers a visual analog to the profound disequilibrium we are experiencing both privately and institutionally. All that we assumed to be stable and predictable has been revealed to be otherwise. I liken each of these pieces of this series to a freeze-frame in a film sequence at the precise inflection point when a building, a psyche, or a society begins to succumb to gravity.

The common threads connecting the other related artworks are the spatial and temporal disjunctions we are experiencing in our rapidly changing world. To that end, I deploy what I characterize as diagrammatic metaphors that help me to visualize ongoing processes of change and transformation. Both the Dys/Junctures and the Never the Same Space Twice series reflect my lifelong fascination with discontinuities, disruptions, and detours.

In my previous paintings and projects I conjure a sense of space that is highly elastic and ambiguous. I aim to juggle and confound those key oppositions that underpin spatial coherence: basic binaries such as close/distant; container/contained; surface/depth; opaque/transparent; and so on.

I never really know the true nature of my fascinations and certainly not these forays (actual and artistic) into various states of disorientation and dislocation. Yet I feel we are experiencing unprecedented transformations of our built and virtual environments, and so ultimately these works are neither more nor less than my playful stabs at a better understanding.

Steven Baris (b. 1953, Aberdeen, WA) received his MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, PA. He studied at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA, and Instituto Allende, San Miguel de Allende in Mexico. Baris has exhibited widely in the US and internationally, in such museums and institutions as: National Museum, Lublin, Poland; Wilhelm Morgner Museum, Soest, Germany; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Institute of Visual Arts in Kielce, Poland; Museum St. Wendel, Germany; Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens, Penzance, UK; The Print Center, Philadelphia, PA; Ely Center of Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, Wilmington, DE; Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Summit, NJ; Atelierhof Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany; INTERNATIONAL BIENNIAL OF NON-OBJECTIVE ART, Pont de Claix, France; Kunstlerhaus Dosenfabrik, Hamburg, Germany; Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery, Pittsburgh, PA; University of Texas at Dallas, Dallas, TX; The Drawing Center, New York, NY, and more.

His work is included in numerous corporate and private collections across North America, Europe, and Australia, as well as the museum collections of National Museum, Lublin, Poland, and Copelouzos Museum, Athens, Greece.

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