James Barth
The Clumped Spirit
19 October–22 December 202419 Oct–22 Dec 2024
#TheClumpedSpirit
James Barth: The Clumped Spirit is the third in a series of annual $80,000 commissions, funded by the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, and delivered in partnership with leading Australian galleries, to support mid-career and established artists to develop and present major new bodies of work. Previous instalments were TextaQueen: Bollywouldn’t at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Gadigal/Sydney, in 2022, and James Nguyen: Open Glossary at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, 2023.
Barth studied at Queensland College of Art, graduating in 2014. She trained as a painter and her works play on traditional genres of portraiture and still life but exceed them. Using 3D-modelling software, she creates stages, props, and avatars, which are then transmuted into screen-printed oil paintings and animated videos. In her paintings, screen-printed images are brushed to soften them, scrambling the impersonal and the painterly.
Much of Barth’s work explores the themes of self representation and embodiment, contending with her experience as a trans-woman, navigating the constant pressures of visibility and vulnerability. Her works often depict domestic scenes. Sometimes they showing idealised imagery; sometimes scenes overwhelmed by decay. Mounds of organic material, such as cut-open fruit and leftover food are left to sweat and decompose. Her uncanny world is imbued with a sense of ennui and listlessness.
In addition to new paintings and video, The Clumped Spirit makes a dramatic move into sculpture. Barth’s 3D-printed sculptures are coated in zinc, recalling petrified figures from Pompeii.
The Clumped Spirit is presented as part of Copyright Agency Partnerships, an annual commissioning series supporting mid-career and established visual artists to develop and present a major new body of work. It is a joint project with UNSW Galleries, Gadigal/Sydney, and supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, the IMA Commissioners Circle, and UNSW New Contemporaries.
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Off-Site Venues
- UNSW Galleries
Gadigal/Sydney14 Feb–04 May 2025
Artist Bio
James Barth is a Meanjin/Brisbane-based artist. Her group exhibitions include the 2024 Adelaide Biennale, Art Gallery of South Australia, Tartanya/Adelaide, 2024; Embodied Knowledge: Contemporary Queensland Art, Queensland Art Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2022; New Woman, Museum of Brisbane, 2019; and Assuming Surface, Outer Space, Meanjin/Brisbane, 2018. Her work is held in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Monash University Museum of Art, Naarm/Melbourne; Griffith University Art Museum, Meanjin/Brisbane; and V&A, London. She is represented by Milani Gallery, Meanjin/Brisbane.
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The Institute of Modern Art acknowledges the traditional custodians of the land upon which the IMA now stands, the Jagera, Yuggera, Yugarapul, and Turrbal people. We offer our respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the first artists of this country. In the spirit of allyship, the IMA will continue to work with First Nations people to celebrate, support, and present their immense past, present, and future contribution to artistic practice and cultural expression.