Dissonance between the Self and the Material: James Barth, The Clumped Spirit
James Barth, The Clumped Spirit, Installation view, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 19 October – 22 December, 2024. Photo: Joe Ruckli
In its final weeks, James Barth’s solo exhibition at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane is the third in a series of annual commissions supported by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund. The Clumped Spirit continues until December 22, 2024.
Plato’s Republic introduces the aesthetic concept of mimesis. According to Plato, the image is a mimetic representation of form. In this way, portraiture must be considered a mimetic representation of the self. Artist James Barth considers this fabrication of the self in her recent exhibition, The Clumped Spirit, at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
In his exhibition catalogue, curator Tim Riley Walsh writes,
“The self is diffused, atomised as a means of capturing Barth’s desire to decompose the bounds of identity and representation.”1
Barth’s oeuvre is a painterly trajectory from realist depictions to a consideration of the self within the material. Her trajectory unfolds like an uncovering of the mimetic quality of art-making. Trained at Brisbane’s Queensland College of Art as an oil painter in 2018; Barth pivoted to a multilayered practice combining photography and computer manipulation; Barth pivoted to a multilayered practice that combined photography, computer manipulation, and silk-screen printing. The layers of materiality extend the distance between the artist and the artistic object, thus unveiling the deception of the artistic image. As curator and writer James Gatt writes,
“What’s easy to forget in her representation (a testament to their compelling believability) is the simple fact of their ontological separation from reality: a painting is not the person it depicts. It’s here we find the relationship between self and self-representation, upon which autobiography pivots.”2
Image credit: James Barth, Stone Milker (Study #4), 2024, Oil paint screen printed on marine ply and cedar, Four panels: 178.0 × 228.0 cm. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery
This is particularly poignant in her work Barth's digital avatar Umbrageous Self-Portrait (2019), in which Barth—or, as the artist refers to her superimposed self, Digi James—languidly sits in the dappled light. The work is a self-portrait depicting Barth's digital avatar of herself. The dappled light mutes perceptivity and disguises Digi James as James Barth herself. In this way, Barth teases out the deceptive quality of the work of art.
Recent works exhibited for The Clumped Spirit extend and distort Barth’s traditional painterly training. Her current practice involves photographing images printed on silkscreens using grey-scale oil, which is then brushed to blur the printed oil image.
Image credit: James Barth, Stone Milker (Study #3), 2024, Oil paint screen printed on marine ply and cedar, Four panels: 178.0 × 228.0 cm. Courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery
If her earlier works and her manipulation of materials aim to distance herself from the work — because she focused on realist depiction, these more recent works reveal her critique of it. Her painted works for The Clumped Spirit disclose the falsity of realism and confound this critique to consider presentations of the self. Her digitisation of herself and manipulation of materials aim to distance her from the work because a work of art will never truthfully depict the rich experience of the self.
Riley Walsh notes in his catalogue essay how Barth presents a perpetual struggle to render material the ineffable, to make material her selfhood.
“These recent works pursued the self-image with a sense of being wronged by it, awoken to its fallibility. But also, awoken to the constant demands of the art world and broader society to represent and depict her selfhood — often without a fuller, more nuanced reflection on what lies beneath as an individual.”3
Walsh’s reflection captures the tension of these recent paintings. Her work for The Clumped Spirit considers the struggle to make succinct the complexity of the self.
The neat categorisation of existing as a queer artist doesn’t quite describe the artistic quality of being in a body. The Clumped Spirit reinvigorates value in the inarticulate and the aesthetic — unattached to categorisations of discursive knowing. James Gatt quotes Barthe on her intention to creative work, which is “generative rather than purely deconstructive queerness”4. These recent paintings do such; existing beyond any recognisable categorisation, they resist simplistic decoding.
