The Chelsea’s own Rita Barros has a show of her photographs currently running at the 80 Washington Square East Galleries. Though it’s a group show, Rita has a whole room to herself and 
17 of her photos are up (and it’s the front room too; that should give you a hint that the curator thinks highly of her work), so it’s definitely worth dropping by.
“Spoken loneliness is prophesy, in the moon a hundred years ago or today in Kansas...” So says Allen Ginsberg in his poem “Wichita Vortex Sutra” and the loneliness of Rita Barros’s photos are their most salient detail. Her photos are pregnant with foreboding and anticipation: you expect something to happen, something must happen. The Images are incomplete. They call forth a figure (God? Satan?) to complete them, to add the finishing touch in the creative act.
There are two series of Photos: a series of dark, dreamy visions shot in available light, and a series of glittering, almost giddily full-colored images apparently photographed under a spotlight. The photos are purported to tell a story-- a journey from home to a funeral, perhaps--but I think a 
straightforward narrative hardly exhausts the images’ meaning and I fear it may even trivialize the primal response they inevitable evoke in the viewer. Though we reject the photographer’s guidance at our own peril, it soon becomes clear that her photos transcend the bounds of her own interpretation.
Many of the photos in what I’m calling the first series are shot in a simple, Spartan room, bringing to mind immediately the question of who lives there. A coffee pot sits on a burner as the blue flames lick it’s belly, aglow with the preternatural light of the scarcely-waking state of consciousness with which one moves through this early morning world. Similarly, in another photo, a hand cups the eerie red flame of a lighter, illumining stacks of dishes framed inexplicably in a square--as if images in some puppet theatre out of Plato’s Cave--giving them a false order and ourselves a false assurance against the chaos that looms within the impenetrable blackness of the surround. In this twilight between sleeping and waking, where a darker logic holds sway, we glide like ghosts, only half-aware as we perform our secret habitual rites of the morning. In a third photo, echoing and reinforcing this image, the square screen of a television, silently humming with it’s gray snow-static, portends a passage into the sliver of un-peopled city glimpsed in the wall beyond.
In the second series we burst forth into light, though not quite the light of the “real” world; it is rather the light of Times Square, the Carnival, the hallucination. We view images of day-glow blue 
fabric with leaves, a blue-cloth wrapped bicycle seat, spangly gold slippers, and a votive candle lit not with it’s own soft light, but rendered in Technicolor by the spotlights of our unearthly new consciousness. Though these objects appear at first glimpse more like what we see our waking world to be, the light here is artificial. The dimmer vision--of dreams and the unconscious—turns out to be, in it’s inception, closer to our lived reality. And when you realize this, what at first seemed cheerful now seems falsely optimistic, a dizzy manic delirium, a Prozac Oz. Are we in Heaven, or a cloyingly sweet version of Hell?
It is in the dialectic interplay between these two disparate visions of reality that we discern the true import of Rita’s world view: turning inward, meaning lurks below the surface, but also outwardly sparkles above it as we ascend through a hypnogogic dream state into a hyper-consciousness of our surroundings where spirits perch epiphenomenal on the shimmering surface of each drop of dew. And yet, despite this revelation, we plod on, still dreaming our solipsistic dream, still haunted by an absence, still utterly alone.
In what was for me the most poignant image of the show, a bed frame sits in a tiny, bare room bathed in greenish, light. The setting is stark, institutional. Significantly, the mattress has been stripped from the bed to avoid contagion, and we sense the presence of the unseen patient who has abandoned the bed, perhaps to death. Reinforcing this perception, a photo larger than the rest is mounted on the opposite wall (I almost missed it). In what is obviously another room in the same building, bathed in the same green light now reinforced by a glimpse of greenery in the window (from a springtime the deceased leaves behind?), a chair sits waiting for an exit interview: what have you learned during your time at the institution? Ed Hamilton
Recent Comments