Tim Barber x Saturdays NYC

Continuous Squeeze is your first solo show in a decade. How have you been working on your sculptural practice without the pressure of making a show? It seems that there is a mystery or privacy to your works that does not fall into trends or categories.

I am in the studio on a regular basis, I’d say on average 3-4 days a week. So, whether I have an immediate deadline or not generally does not determine how offer I’m working in the studio. Studio time for me is split between different activities or “work/labor”. I usually have at least one thing that is progressing well and moving towards completion, one that appears or feels like it’s stuck or stalled and then there is something or new material I’m experimenting with or trying to further understand and whether it has any future place in my work, or not. It is this last endeavor that is the slowest process with no guarantee that anything will be accomplished.

And yes, the studio is isolated from others, meaning I do not have a staff of studio assistants with a definitive set of tasks to perform. I generally work alone which allows for risk and discovery, no audience to watch me have a bad day in the studio or fail. The studio for me is a very private head and body space which I think allows me to be less inhibited.

As to the 10-year period two of those ten were effectively surrendered to the COVID pandemic when it came to studio visits and public venues. This was also when both of my galleries (Team Gallery and Richard Telles Fine Arts) effectively closed, which looking back on it proved to be somewhat liberating for my studio activity. At the time it was a lot of what I thought was bad news all at once however it all probably came at the right time for me.  I’m now enjoying the change of scenery.

A central part of your practice is exploring how inorganic materials can become organic-looking. Tell me more about your interest in creating this kind of visual effects?

Thinking and talking about the space between the organic and inorganic is a curious thing. There might have been a period when we lived in a world where these two were clearly defined. Now I know scientifically they still are and mutually exclusive. But I I’m not so sure that’s haw we as a species experience the two. We seem to live in a time and space where the two slip in and out of their ontological categories or definitions. The “organic” and the ‘non-organic” are increasingly becoming conflated. How else would you describe our fledgling relationship with AI or CGI.

Now I’m still working with “real” materials and fairly 20th century methods of object making/ rendering. But I’m interested in how the natural, whatever that might mean, and the un-natural join or intersect or maybe just collide.

The erotic, acts of coupling and decoupling, is paramount across your body of works. I am especially fascinated by how you combine erotic imagery with visual perspectives. A sculpture that seems clinical can appear to be ludicrous at a different angle, such as Coupled Prop (white, green), 2025. How do you think through shifting interpretations in your work?

I love thinking about the phenomenology of objects. Their shapes and possible meanings through association, both familiar and not so. Sometimes a thing can be both familiar or understood and then quickly shift into alien obscurity or the abstract. A lot of what humans do or to be more precise invest in is kind of ludicrous. Over designed fetishism can be found everywhere we (humans) have had complete control over. Look no further than the kitchen gadgets and high-end bathroom architecture/design that is venerated. It seems to me that most of our production values are born out of the act of arousal.  Value has extended beyond basic needs or task completion. We live in a period when corporeal arousal is value dominant.

Your earlier works seem to be more interested in tensions of mutual dependency or thresholds, whereas your recent works are more about how the human form can be evoked in the absence of a human body. What motivates this shift from constructing an intricate system toward hybrid structures between bodies and functional objects?

Well, whenever you have two or more things (objects) coupling up to form one dependency as a subject is always present in the narrative. What I’m interested in is that space or gap between the surrogate (stand in) and the accoutrement (ornament/equipment).

Another dimension of your exploring hybridity is that your recent sculptures often play with surface and depth, especially through using negative space. I am curious as to how you think about dimensionality.

I would consider myself a sculptor in the truest sense of the word. Which means I find myself thinking about fundamental attributes that define both an object/sculpture and how we coexist with it. So, things like space and time, surface or skin, weight and volume are paramount.

The motifs of wellness culture often recur in your sculptures. What attracts you to the culture of self-optimization?

This is such a great question and topic, wellness culture and our pursuit of self-optimization.

If we look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs diagram wellness culture of self-optimization might find itself positioned at the top of the pyramid under the heading “self-actualization” but with a sometimes-weird twist to it because this wellness culture end game seems to try and cheat mortality. Which is the most un-human thing I can think of.