Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space

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Projectors cast red rectangles on a small foreground screen, a large screen projection of oil drilling rigs in back.

Installation view, Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space, MIT List Visual Art Center, 2015.

Location
Hayden & Reference Galleries
Featured Artists
Rosa Barba
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Rosa Barba’s works encompassing sculptures, installations, text pieces, and publications are grounded in the material qualities of cinema.

Her film sculptures examine the physical properties of the projector, celluloid, and projected light. Barba’s longer projected works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative, and are indeterminately situated in the past or the future. These speculative stories probe into the relationship of historical record, personal anecdote, and filmic representation. For this first survey of her work in North America, Barba premieres The Color Out of Space (2015), a new film incorporating images of stars and planets collected over the last year at Hirsch Observatory at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The work expands upon Barba’s ongoing interrogation of geological time as measured against the span of a human lifetime. The exhibition includes works made over the last ten years including two of Barba’s cinematic large projections, which focus on natural landscapes and man-made interventions into the environment, as well as a group of small projector sculptures and wall works.

Rosa Barba (b. 1972, Sicily, Italy) lives and works in Berlin. Barba studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. Solo exhibitions include Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Kunstverein Braunschweig, Germany among others. She was a resident artist at Artpace, San Antonio in 2014 and at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa in 2013.

Rosa Barba: The Color Out of Space is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Curator, MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Sponsors

Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Consulate General of Italy in Boston, Goethe-Institut Boston, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, Terry & Rick Stone, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and many generous individual donors.

Images

Black and white, green, red images projected onto and through 4 glass panels of the table sculpture fall onto a dark wall.
Projectors cast red rectangles on a small foreground screen, a large screen projection of oil drilling rigs in back.
Lit orange screen hangs next to the colorful projection of stars and orbs through the glass panels of a table sculpture.
Hanging projector casts a lit rectangle on a wall next to a large window, in the back corner, 3 triangular lit sculptures.
Lit orange screen hangs next to the colorful projection of planetary orbs through the glass panels of a table sculpture.
3 triangular sculptures, each internally-lit and fitted with 35mm film and spools, stand before a corner of the dark gallery.
Seated on the floor of a dark gallery, a projector casts overlapping yellow rectangles on a translucent screen.
Large oil drilling rigs against a murky blue sky is projected on a large cinematic screen in a dark gallery.
Aerial view of a brown and white excavated landscape is projected on a large screen, next to the large black projector.
3 triangular sculptures, each internally-lit and fitted with 35mm film and spools, sit tilting in various directions.
Set on the floor of a gallery, a projector cast red rectangles onto a translucent screen.
A luminous sphere against black, perhaps a planet with black and white swirling clouds
Close up of the blurred, uneven gray and white surface of a moon or planet
A large rusted, metal excavator rake sits isolated in a white-gray, snow-covered, coastal landscape.

Events

Videos

Rosa Barba The Color Out of Space

Preview image for the video "Rosa Barba The Color Out of Space".

Related Publication

The Color Out of Space

2016, Dancing Foxes Press | MIT List Visual Arts Center | EMPAC Rensselaer

View publication

Book cover for The Color Out of Space featuring a night sky lit only by light illuminating from buildings in the foreground.

Press

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