Barbara Ess at Curt Marcus - photographic exhibition - Brief Article

Art in America, Nov, 2000 by Sarah Schmerler

Barbara Ess's spring solo show was a strange and potent mixture of dream and reality. On display were recent examples of her familiar dark-edged photos made with a pinhole camera--a medium the artist has been using for some 20 years--as well as a single video.

We began the show to find Ess a sort of sensuous naturalist, at once embracing and studying small things around her. One large photo features the artist's disembodied hands cupping the head of a huge mushroom. Another photo features several small images of mushrooms printed contact sheet style. Some of the mushrooms still have dirt clinging to their softly phallic heads; others, the caps separated from their stems, look like miniature spacecraft. The strangest things on earth might also be the loveliest, Ess seems to be saying, if only we were unafraid to truly see them.

This heady mixture of romance and clinical observation comes to the fore in Acid Karaoke, a 46-minute video in which we see various people of all ages and types trying to express a kind of personal ecstasy. Each person wears headphones and faces the camera, speaking as if in a state somewhere between orgasm and beatitude. "I would say yes." "You want to give yourself." "I feel so benevolent." After a few minutes it seemed that they must be working from a script, probably cued by headphones. Ess actually took the text from an experiment with hallucinogens, but you don't have to know that to get hooked. Forty-six minutes of universal love is, on the whole, pretty infectious.

As trippy as that video is, it's also direct and unapologetic (a nice foil to some of the more enigmatically murky photos). What's more, Ess seemed to want to include us in her experiment. Since the audio didn't play in the gallery, we had to don headphones to hear the words, just like the people in the video. Whether or not we decided to join their ecstatic ranks was up to us.