SOUTHFIRST 60 North 6th Street Brooklyn, NY 11211 www.southfirst.org

JARED BARK

Photobooth Works, 1969-1976

September 26 – November 15, 2015

Reception for the artist, Thursday, September 24, 6 - 8 PM

SOUTHFIRST is proud to present "Jared Bark: Photobooth Works, 1969-1976" the first solo exhibition in New York presenting the experimental photographic and performance work of JARED BARK in over 35 years. The pieces on view, many exhibited for the first time, explore the possibilities of minimal performance utilizing the body and simple objects within the confines of a predetermined popular format, the photo booth and its four-frame, 1.5” x 8” strip. The exhibition also features two videos documenting Bark’s performance pieces: Four Failures and Exit, from a performance in front of an audience at Red Grooms’ studio in 1972, and an excerpt from The Neutron Readings (1976). The show, curated by Maika Pollack, is on view from September 26 – November 15. 

The photo booth in Bark’s work becomes a stage-like space in which the artist simultaneously enacts and documents actions. Some works utilize the artist’s body as their subject while others are unaltered grids featuring manipulated objects such as a stick or ruler. The dozens of original works draw a line between the legacy of serial photography, and downtown performance and dance in New York during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Bark grew up and went to college in Palo Alto, CA, where he became familiar at a young age with Eadweard Muybridge’s stop-motion studies as well as Edwin Land’s Polaroid camera. In 1966, after graduating from Stanford, he moved to New York and became integrated into the downtown performance community, appearing in works choreographed by Trisha Brown and Deborah Hay. Particularly close to the Judson Dance Theater group, his work during this period explores compositional practices including seriality, one-thing-after-another composition, humor, everyday movement, and chance.

Jared Bark (b. 1944) has a BA from Stanford. His photo booth photography first appeared in When Attitudes Become Form (1969), curated by Harold Szeeman, and subsequently in solo exhibitions at the Holly Solomon Gallery, 112 Greene Street Gallery, and the Bykert/Downtown gallery, NY. His performance work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Hallwalls (Buffalo, NY), documenta 6 in Kassel, Germany, and Marcia Tucker’s seminal program Four Evenings, Four Days; it was recently featured in Rituals of Rented Island at the Whitney. Writers about his work include Roberta Smith, Sally Banes, Robert Pincus-Witten, and John Ashbury, among others. He lives and works in New York and Warwick, NY.

SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located at 60 North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Sat. and Sun. from 1 - 6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact the gallery at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.