Rosa Barba Isolation of Information (roller), 2015
Linoleum print ink on wax
Ø 28 x 55 cm (sculpture)
72 x 65 x 38 cm (plinth)
72 x 65 x 38 cm (plinth)
Edition of 3
The works in the Isolation of Information (roller) (2015) series are part of a landscape containing the record of thousands of metal letterpress blocks. They vary in size, occupying space differently, and are organized into some kind of visual, rather than alphabetic or linguistic logic. The particular typeface suggests a specific period of Modernist design as well as a sense of place; a kind of knowledge or politics. In fact, these are the blocks from an Italian printer who specialized in literature. After 40 years he retired and the work series becomes an epitaph of sorts to the printer, all the books printed with these blocks, perhaps to literature itself. As with other works that involve film and its apparatus, these objects emanate a sense of a past era where the objects' original purpose and function has been superseded, leaving it to evolve new forms of film or literature that dispense with the tropes and conventions of historical cinema mutating into a future form.
Rosa Barba engages within the medium of film through a sculptural approach. In her works, Barba creates installations and site-specific interventions to analyze the ways film articulates space, placing the work and the viewer in a new relationship. Questions of composition, physicality of form and plasticity play an important role for the artist as Barba examines the industry of cinema and its staging vis-à-vis gesture, genre, information and documents. Her film works are situated between experimental documentary and fictional narrative. They often focus on natural landscapes and human-made interventions into the environment and explore the relationship of historical records, personal anecdotes, and filmic representation, creating spaces of memory and uncertainty.
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