Steven Baris

As should be evident from viewing my various galleries and projects, I am not content to pursue a single investigation indefinitely, but rather I move back and forth among different series of works. For the most part, they relate to each other as they are driven by similar themes and obsessions. Yet, each is sufficiently different as to justify their own, separate statements. Below are recent brief statements addressing a few of my more recent bodies of work—specifically the Never the Same Space Twice, Stations of Attention, and the Toppling & Dys/Equilibria series.

I characterize my work as diagrammatic, a far more apt term than the nearly meaningless category of abstraction or even geometric abstraction. It is not that my work is meant to look like conventional diagrams; rather I deploy similar visual vocabularies and what I describe as “performative geometries” to visualize more ineffable features of experience. Essentially, diagrams are graphic displays that map otherwise invisible temporal processes and space-time relationships. This is precisely what I aim to achieve in my paintings.

A common denominator animating the recent work is my fascination with the pervasive duality of continuity-discontinuity. These conflicting spatial and temporal intuitions simultaneously illuminate and muddle our understanding of so many realms of experience, ranging from the wave and particle components of light to the analog and digital that underpins our technological ecosystem. And so on.

With the series, Never the Same Space Twice, I deploy a geometric visual language to evoke what I describe as hybrid topological route maps and flow charts. Unlike conventional topographical maps that implicitly assume continuous movement over a continuous surface, topological maps (e.g. transit maps) make no claim to represent any continuum; rather they focus on topological properties such as connectedness & separation, spatial order, relative proximity and distance, etc. I would argue that the topological more accurately maps our contemporary, hyper networked life world. As for the artworks presented here, they map no specific or actual space, but instead enact a virtual experience of negotiating indeterminate terrains marked by discontinuities, disruptions, and detours.

The second series, Stations of Attention, toys with continuity-discontinuity on a much different register, namely consciousness and it’s more more salient feature, attention. This work takes as its starting point William James’ famous hydraulic metaphor, “stream of consciousness” and contrasts it with a plethora of more recent theories and empirical research that point to a far more discontinuous and episodic process. This work is influenced by an intersection of my research into cognition and consciousness and my lifelong study and practice in Buddhist philosophy. Stages of Attention entertains a diagrammatic simulacrum of attention as a decidedly fragmented and nonlinear operation, yet one we falsely believe to be otherwise—not so different than when a film slows to fewer than eighteen frames per second and reveals our perception of continuous movement as an illusion. With the works presented here, the prominent, central array of whole and broken circles stands, for me, as shifting archipelagos of “mind moments” emerging from an extended field of those barely at the threshold of consciousness.

The Toppling series was initiated during the pandemic and thus created under mental duress—no doubt a similar kind of duress felt by anyone inhabiting this seemingly endless saga of unprecedented social, political, and ecological upheavals. This series offers a visual analog to the profound disequilibrium we are experiencing both privately and institutionally. All that we assumed to be stable and predictable has been revealed to be otherwise. I liken each of these pieces of this series to a freeze-frame in a film sequence at the precise inflection point when a building, a body, a psyche, or a society begins to succumb to gravity.