Noah Barker

Lonesome Wife @ Seventeen, Sep 29 – Nov 5

28 September 2016

The Lonesome Wife group exhibition is on at London’s Seventeen, opening September 30 and running to November 5.

Organised by Attilia Fattori Franchini, the exhibition includes Lisa Holzer, Isaac Lythgoe, Victoria Adam, Adriano Amaral, Noah Barker, Luis Miguel BendañaPatrizio di MassimoJustin Fitzpatrick, and Vanessa Safavi.   

The exhibition takes its name from American novelist William H. Gass’ 1989 book Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife. The press release includes an excerpt that states “…there’s nothing female about a column of air, a gall on a tree – surely both, like bloomers on the swing’s seat… so I’m a spiky bush at least, I like to think, knotty and low growing, scratchy though flowering, a hawthorne would suit me”, alluding to the themes of the show.

Using text as a starting point, Gass creates “a parallel between a concrete use of language and the female body of Babs Masters, both employed as tools of persuasion, absorbing the reader-viewer in a game of intimate eclipse and revelation”. The exhibition explores seduction and how it can serve as narrative tool as well as “an antidote to boredom and disinterest”. Exhibited works hint at the body, the physicality of text and the linguistic capacity of objects. They move between form, process and content, to be read or to be felt.

See the Seventeen website for details.**

Seventeen

Luis Miguel Bendaña, ‘Blush On A Man’ (2015), Detail. Courtesy the artist.

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Michael Debatty + Noah Barker @ Exo Exo + Lodos, Jun 23

21 June 2016

Paris’ EXO EXO and Mexico City’s Lodos Gallery have teamed up to present duo show by Michael Debatty and Noah Barker on June 23 in the former’s Paris site.

The press release discusses the exhibition in terms of what it describes as the ‘micro’, pragmatically framing the angle as one that aids coalition and alliance building between project spaces such as Exo in France and Lodos in Mexico:

“This is not to conclude the engagement as ineffectual in furthering the collective interests; rather it invites a time for sober second thoughts and doses of pragmatism.”

The short one-day gap that the exhibition can be referred to is also a coming together of a larger gap, quite intentionally it seems, left open, between “expectation and product” on the artists’ part, creating a space for “alternative vision”, as there is otherwise very little information to accompany the untitled show, and a plain grey jpeg poses as its leading image.

Debatty is Leige-based and Barker, New York-based, has presented in Mexico with the likes of Puppies Puppies and Aline Bouvy.

See the FB event for more details.**

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Are You Thinking About Atlantis? @ Parallel /// Oaxaca, Feb 14

14 February 2014

Mexico’s Parallel /// Oaxaca and Belgium’s Komplot present cross-cultural group exhibition Are You Thinking About Atlantis?, opening February 14.

Conceived during the inaugural Material Art Fair in Mexico this year, the show features artists Aline Bouvy and David Evrard from Brussels, Noah Barker, Timothy James Kelly and Puppies Puppies from Lodos Contemporáneo and Stefan Benchoam from Guatemalan gallery Proyectos Ultravioleta.

Giving insight into the the perspectives of artists from across Brussels, Chicago, Oaxaca and Guatemala, the exhibition reflects on their differing conceptual and physical topologies in a “spontaneous and reactive” curatorial gesture, founded on exchange and resulting in a collision of “the presence of works with a dissolution of discourse”. Liquidity abounds.

See the Parallel /// Oaxaca website for details. **

Header image: Puppies Puppies and Noah Barker, Are You Thinking About Atlantis?.

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