Dimensions: support: 3460 x 4157 mm
Copyright: © Uta Barth, courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, NY | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: Uta Barth, born in 1958, created "Field #20," part of her series exploring the edges of perception. The image presents a blurred, almost dreamlike view of an urban scene. Editor: It's strangely calming, isn’t it? A sort of visual hush, a retreat from the sharp edges of the everyday. Even the traffic light is softened, losing its authority. Curator: Yes, the blurring transforms the familiar, the traffic light becoming less a signal and more a symbol. Red, of course, often signifies warning, but also passion or sacrifice. Here, it’s muted. Editor: Maybe that’s its commentary: how even urgency gets lost in the constant noise. The built environment fades into impressionistic background, suggesting the individual is subsumed, insignificant. Curator: Or perhaps it's about memory, the haziness representing recollection’s unreliability, its emotional shading. It evokes a particular kind of contemporary alienation. Editor: Perhaps. It certainly invites introspection, forcing us to actively engage with what we see, or rather, what we think we see. Curator: Exactly. I find it poignant that something seemingly insignificant can prompt such reflection. Editor: It makes you wonder about all the blurred edges of our lives, and what they obscure or reveal.
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Field #20 is a large, wall-sized canvas onto which a photograph has been printed in acrylic. It was commercially produced by Folio D, San Diego California, who used a high-resolution dot jet printer to transfer the digitally scanned image onto the canvas. It is a unique photographic print and has not been computer manipulated in any way. It is the largest work to date by Barth and was created, together with Field #21 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) specially for a Wall project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 1997. The scale of these two works was partly determined by the space in which they were to be exhibited at the museum. Field #20 is derived from a photograph of a street corner taken deliberately out-of-focus and with a shallow depth of field. At a superficial glance, the image resembles an abstract design of muted browns and greys out of which red traffic lights, expanded by the out-of-focus effect, blaze dramatically. At the Museum of Contemporary Art the two Fields were installed in the windows and created a disorientating effect through their scale and blurred appearance. Close-up they look like an abstract composition of coloured dots and from a distance the street scenes they depict appear distorted as if seen through wet or partially opaque glass.
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