Artist, Judith Barry: Imagine feeling surprise as the top of your head is suddenly struck by a runny, viscous substance. You don't know yet what it is, and you begin to imagine. And then, somewhat miraculously, your face, your hair are all wiped clean. And as you relax for a moment, another substance is doused on you again and again and again.
My name is Judith Barry and I’m an artist.
All I described is accomplished with the video wipe and the video loop, which could be thought of as forms of punctuation—how you make a transition from one place to another. The wipe arrests the narrative, and then the video loop allows the narrative to continue endlessly.
The initial impetus for making Imagination, dead imagine was the AIDS epidemic which began in the 1980s. At the time bodies were described as forming scabs, that kind of ate your body away, essentially. And that's why I didn't wanna make artworks about the AIDS body decaying; and I didn't want it to be sad. I thought, Okay, what can I do about the body that's a celebration of the body? Like, isn't it great we have bodies, and look, they make this. I wanted that sort of childlike relationship with the body.
The materials that you see poured on the actors are all natural materials that are 100% safe for humans. I wanted realism, so I worked with a terrific makeup and effects artist. We spent many hours in the basement of my studio experimenting with different materials and how we could make the different effects that we wanted to happen.
And we also didn't tell the actors when they were going to be poured on. I wanted them to actually experience surprise as they were performing. We decided we would incorporate the actor's breathing as part of the soundtrack. So you hear the pouring and you also hear slight irregularities in their breath as they respond to the pours. I wanted it to seem as though someone was actually inhabiting the structure of this work, and experiencing all these moments viscerally in real time.