SE BARNET
ONE PLACE TO ANOTHER
April 26 – June 7, 2008
Opening reception:
Saturday, April 26, 6 to 8 pm
http://www.gallerydesoto.com
De Soto Gallery presents SE Barnet’s One Place To Another, an exhibition of photography, new media based works, and film. This is Barnet’s first solo exhibition with de Soto Gallery.
SE Barnet makes works that begin with open-ended scenarios around collaboration, interaction, and authorship. Her practice integrates the public realm whether in the form of physical landscape, political environment, and/or social community playing with the gap between expectation and actuality in an approach that often embraces error and incongruity.
In the digital age, as opportunities for communication and travel (virtual or actual) increases on a global scale, so too does our interconnectedness and the possibility for exchange. In “One Place to Another,” Barnet explores this interaction based on the premise that the traveler acts as observer. In the position of tourist even the ordinary is reflected in the light of the unfamiliar.
Using this model of tourism as a mode for looking outside oneself, Barnet explores the schism between varying conceptions and interpretations. For “Ulster Museum,” Barnet begins with a photograph that emphasizes the museum’s amalgam of modern and classical architecture. She then overlays her own digitized drawings on top of the existing structures as imaginings for a possible extension. Barnet’s act of mark making in the landscape questions who is doing the looking and points to disjuncture of ideas over time.
In another work, a two part piece entitled Travel Office, two photographs of a travel agency are taken from different vantage points, one looking in and one looking out. The difference in perspectives calls attention to distinction between inside and outside, here and there. Similarly “In Keen and Quivering Ratio,” a short film in which the artist alternately points the camera at herself and towards her own ephemeral observations, is an attempt to capture an internal experience visually. Through watching herself in the act of looking she attempts to blur the line between internal and external.
SE Barnet’s work has been exhibited internationally including The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the ICA in London, the American Academy in Rome, Galerie Christine Koenig in Vienna, and Nederland’s Instituut voor MediaKunst Montevideo. She has held academic appointments at Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and UC Riverside. She is currently pursuing a PhD in fine art practice at Kingston University in the UK.
One Place To Another will be on view at de Soto Gallery from April 26 thru June 7, 2008. Gallery hours are Wednesday thru Saturday, noon to 5pm, and by appointment. Biographical information and images are available our website at http://www.gallerydesoto.com For further information and reproductions please contact Shelley de Soto at info@gallerydesoto.com 323-319.6331.
de Soto
108 W. 2nd St., Suite 104
Los Angeles Ca, 90012
TEL. 323-319-6331
