Buy Tickets
Doors 7pm / Show 7:30pm
$15 / free or discounted for members
Advance prices include ticketing fees. Request your member DICE Code here.

Co-presented with San Francisco Cinematheque

I absolutely think about the audience when writing and scheming a piece of work. I think about what I can do to them. What I can poke or press, and I have epic and heartbreaking imaginings of what they will do to me in turn. This awareness of an actual and yet, not actual audience is, for me, the most profound element of art production and the most precise metaphor for existential terror. (Stephanie Barber interviewed by Joanna Raczynska, 2018; published by INCITE Journal of Experimental Media)

Working now for three decades, prolific filmmaker and language artist Stephanie Barber has developed a vastly intricate body of work—encompassing film, video, performance, poetry and music—of a nearly unprecedented scope and range. Tending toward the miniature, Barber’s disciplined, hermetic and haiku-like work fuses freeform formalism with inventive explorations of language, narrativity and presence, pleasurably perplexing viewer/participants with conundra of creative wordplay and digressive philosophy while probing the porous boundaries between performativity, sincerity, intellect and emotional affect. Barber appears this evening in person to present a career-spanning cumulus of ten works 1997–2023 ranging from ‘90s era optically-printed films to recent poetic video essays and sculptural works including long-unseen classics and recent favorites including shipfilm, Catalog, The Enlightenment and more. Full screening details here. (Steve Polta)

for a long time i moved with the awareness of one so alone that such aloneness, the pure spectacular nature of such splendid aloneness, must be accompanied by a viewer. a listener. a reader. when and where this reception would occur has yet to be understood but it became clear that documents must be created. documents of attempts at communication. documents of failed communication. communication, reliant as it is on exchange, is so silent when leaving a body alone. more than silent it is not. not a thing, not a sound, not a sight until seen. heard. so it is you that makes my art. you with all the sad and so funny jokes. you with all the ludic tragedy of death rushing towards us unmetered. you with soul and mind carved ready. you with words shifty, right and loyal. thank you. (Stephanie Barber)

Image: Catalog (2005) by Stephanie Barber

SCREENING:
little present for my friend columbus the explorer (1999) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
HEALING (2012) by Stephanie Barber; digital video, b&w, sound, 12 minutes, exhibition file from the maker
Another Horizon (2020) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 9 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
flower, the boy, the librarian (1997) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
Catalog (2005) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 11 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
shipfilm (1998) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
letters, notes (1997) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 7 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
3 Peonies (2017) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 3 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema
The Enlightenment (2023) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 13 minutes, exhibition file from the maker
Oh My Homeland (2019) by Stephanie Barber; 16mm, color, sound, 4 minutes, print from Canyon Cinema