Overview

Aideen Barry is an artist whose means of expression are interchangeable, incorporating performance, moving image and sculptural manifestations. Employing visual trickery to create a heightened suspension of reality, the common denominator of Barry’s work is an attempt to deal with anxiety.

At play in her more recent works is an emphasis on optical fiction to generate a sense of cognitive dissonance. The viewer experiences the work in a paradoxical fashion: attracted and yet repelled. Barry often engages with the instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, questioning an idea of phenomenology and resulting in situations of the uncomfortably strange and threatening. Feminist meditations on gynophobia and the monstrous are a McGuffin in her most recent moving image works.

During her time on residency at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Barry will show solo, presenting some of her most recent performative film works in a survey show at the Royal Hibernian Academy. Other recent significant projects include: 2016 Projects at Lismore Castle, Visual Carlow, DLR Lexicon (2017), Commission by the Arts & Heritage Trust UK (2015), Changing Tracks, EU Public Art Commission (2014), Art Omi International Residency, New York (2013), Headlands Centre for the Arts, San Francisco (2011), Banff Centre Residency (2007), Skaftfell, Iceland (2007). International projects at: Liste Art Fair (Basel, CH) & Mothers Tankstation (2010 & 2011), Wexner Centre, OH (2010), Moderna Musett, SE (2008), Musée des Beaux Arts, Lyon (2009), Louise T. Bloudin Gallery, UK (2007), Galeria I H, Malaga, ES (2012), CAC, ES (2012), Artscene, Shanghai (2005), BAC, Geneva, CH (2011), and Catherine Clarke Gallery, CA (2011).