Bodies populate James Barth’s exhibition, ‘The Clumped Spirit’, at the Institute of Modern Art (IMA) in Meanjin, Brisbane. They stand, sit, recline, and lie in states of syncope. They twist, crouch, stretch, and glitch through space. They look and are looked at. These striking figures, presented through screenprints, moving image, and 3D printed sculptures, bear the artist’s likeness, with and without faces, and are situated in constructed spaces—dwellings, offices, tropical landscapes, and within the framework of ‘the gallery.’ They make me think of the artist languishing in the studio, at home, and in the world.
Having transitioned from traditional self-portraiture to employing an avatar as the primary subject of her work, Barth uses digital self-representation as a strategy of separation, a means to explore self-identity while attempting to sidestep the fetishising gaze often directed at the Other. According to Nuar Alsadir, the digitally mediated self can shield against historically colonising gazes, which transform marginalised bodies into spectacles.1 This distance manifests most clearly in Barth’s employment of avatars: digital beings that function simultaneously as shields and projections. These other Others move through the digital spaces of monochromatic greyscale worlds and freeze in two and three-dimensional moments of time. Yet when our digital self, our avatar, can be anything, the minimal separation between the artist and her avatar in these works proves perplexing. Barth’s avatar, while perhaps not her, bears a striking resemblance to the artist in her features and mannerisms.
Drawing from historical traditions of self-portraiture and still life, Barth reimagines these forms through deliberately imperfect digital processes. Digital spaces have become sites, Lisa Nakamura writes, where “identity is continually performed, created, and recreated” through various forms of self-representation.2 This is evident in Barth’s work as her figures slump, clump, and split. The viewer might struggle to grasp the artist’s sense of separation from these forms, given the time the artist has spent birthing these alternative bodies as both technology novice and maestro. Barth acknowledges her technological limitations, sharing: “I’m actually terrible with technology. Everything I make has this clunky quality because I’m learning as I go.”3 This self-proclaimed constraint is a strength in the works, manifesting as humanness in increasingly digitised spaces.
Throughout the galleries, Barth’s avatars maintain a choreographed ambivalence. Their poses shift between passive and assertive states, while their expressions hold an emotional flatness that defy easy interpretation. Through this apparent detachment emerges a particular kind of cool power. Whether via their direct but unemotional gaze or their calculated occupation of space, these figures invite us to navigate their multiplicity on their own terms; their greyness reinforces the emotional detachment pervading the exhibition.
Barth’s zinc-coated and 3D-printed sculptures appear to seek emotional responses. In their awkward occupation of gallery space, scattered throughout as reluctant performers forced from screen to stage, they seem forlorn. Their presence on traditional plinths proves especially affecting: they are positioned for viewing while seeming to shrink from or extend beyond our gaze. Unlike their painted counterparts, who meet us with direct (if emotionally ambiguous) stares and command their digitised environments, these three-dimensional figures feel displaced, almost discarded. Where Barth’s paintings establish clear power dynamics — the figures gaze first, we merely return their look — these sculptural works appear as subject to our scrutiny, their averted gazes and awkward poses suggest spatial and material contrition.
Barth’s video works emerge as the exhibition’s most compelling element. They recall early real-time capture animations. Their slightly stilted, not-quite-natural movements speak beyond nostalgia to a moment when digital animation was negotiating its relationship with reality, much like Barth’s avatars negotiate their relationship with representation. The figures move through digital landscapes with self-conscious awkwardness in quiet, sometimes mundane, ways that amplify their agency. They merge with environments, bleeding into surfaces and emerging again, commanding these liminal spaces with confident uncertainty characteristic of early digital animations. The videos embrace their handler’s limitations. Barth’s avatars showcase rather than hide their digital construction, turning technical constraints into choreographic choices. Their navigation — sometimes flowing smoothly, other times catching and glitching — creates a specific discourse of digital embodiment. These beings don’t merely exist in digital space, they own it; their awkward navigation becomes a choreography of resistance that speaks to contemporary experiences of digital embodiment and identity formation.
The Clumped Spirit emerges as an exploration of identity’s inherent duality: its simultaneous need for expression and protection. Where traditional self-portraiture often sought to capture and fix identity, Barth’s deliberately imperfect yet representational avatars embody a contemporary understanding of selfhood as fluid and multiply constructed. In their constant state of dissolution and reformation, these figures suggest that perhaps the most effective resistance to the politicisation of the body is to refuse both fixed form and technical perfection. Here, self-representation becomes as much about what is withheld as revealed. This is a quiet but radical act of agency that draws from and disrupts art historical traditions.
- Nuar Alsadir, “Animal Instinct: The Politics of Looking,” The White Review, no. 28, 2020. ↩︎
- Lisa Nakamura, Digitising Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet, University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 13. ↩︎
- James Barth cited in Lisa Havilah, “Digital Intimacies: Contemporary Artists and Technology,” Artlink, 39, no. 2, June 2023. ↩︎
Courtney Coombs is an artist, writer, and facilitator.
