STUDIO AIDEEN BARRY

Barry explores the notion of the contemporary haunted, Possession responds to the notion of being posessed or haunted in some way. Her protagonist is a creature that reflects cognitive dissonance, a housewife who succumbs to a morbid set of circumstances. Trapped in a modern House of Usher, the character responds to her environment, her appliances, her household obligation through absurd gesture that defy reality, and darkly humerours phenomenological reasoning, that plays on our perceptions of the everyday experience of modern living. Aideen Barry's work manifests in the field of contemporary visual arts, but it is punctuated by references to historical and often forgotten or erased figures from literature. Barry is interested in the idea of Autobiographobia (After Susan Sontag). The writer Sontag used the idea of short story as a way of circumventing the autobiographical constructive of a narrative form. Barry often reference artists who's texts play out something very personal and very true to what is in part her own lived experience.In her "performative film" works that Artist constructs laborious optical illusions to be simultaneously in front off and behind the camera at the same time, this often is in part an extension of herself and the impossible and often implausible realities of being a woman in the contemporary world. Barry's use of humour and absurdity is a key tool she often titles her work after literary greats from Samuel Beckett to Flann O Brien, but increasingly the dominance of writers who directly play with Das Unheimlich,The Unhomely/ the Uncanny ( after Freud) are her key muses. Mary Shelly, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, Ursula Le Guin who touch on the Monstrous Feminine act as a catalyst for Barry's explorations of the "othered" sex. The artist is personally committed to rewriting the canon of visual and literary culture by uncovering forgotten texts, figures and anomalies who have fallen foul to erasure through one reason or another. Her works are potent with humour & horror and it employed like a McGufiin by the artists to discuss personal-political concerns. This is what Fintan O Toole has written about it "In it, Barry plays a woman alone in a house that seems to be the only occupied one in a ghost estate. You soon realise that the title is a clever pun. The house is a possession, part of the consumer boom. But it also performs a demonic possession on its inhabitant, taking her over and turning her into its instrument. This is a perfect comment on the situation of many of those trapped in houses with negative equity and no chance of escape. It sounds like a piece of documentary realism, dealing with the Irish “now”. But in fact it’s also utterly gothic; Barry actually uses the phrase “the gothic of the now” in describing her work and preoccupations. She acknowledges her interest in Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker, and Possession is a kind of horror film in which the invasive, ghostly presence is the house itself. Apart from its technical brilliance, though, what’s significant about Barry’s piece is that it is hysterically (the word is deliberate) funny. Barry creates images that are at once terrifyingly mad and laugh-out-loud hilarious: the woman using an electrically controlled garage door to slice bread; the woman turning into a lawnmower. The idea of the past is very strong in the overall gothic form of the piece, but the images themselves are very much on the “now” side of the equation. They play both with technology and with Hollywood movies (The Exorcist is an obvious point of reference)." Gothic realism in the here and now: haunted houses of a dead boom Sat, Sep 1, 2012, 01:00 Fintan O Toole, The Irish Times.