Gary Barwin Part #1: Fictional Bird Jazz

Fictional Bird Jazz. 2025.

Canadian multi-disciplinary artist Gary Barwin engages fluidly across literary, visual, and sonic forms of expression, frequently integrating these modes with striking sophistication and conceptual depth. His recent time-based work Fictional Bird Jazz exemplifies this approach by presenting a video in which words, rendered as bird-like figures, traverse a black field in tandem with a languid jazz soundtrack that echoes their motions. As the textual-birds move through negative space, they fleetingly disclose fragments of an obscured underlying text, without ever revealing either the birds or the words in their entirety. The text is simultaneously legible and illegible, present and deferred as the avian word-forms wing through the darkness. Neither bird-forms or verbal content achieve full presence; instead, meaning here emerges in an obscure space between visibility and erasure reminding me of some of Cy Twombly's so-called blackboard works. The resulting aesthetic effect is both hypnotic and destabilizing, producing a sense that language itself has taken flight, its signifying potential dispersed across visual and sonic forms. This interplay of motion produces an effect that is at once mesmerizing and disorienting, fostering the impression that the textual elements themselves are in perpetual movement.

Fictional Bird Jazz sees image and music collide in a shadowy and mysterious space that, despite the darkness is not without a warmth and oddly reassuring feel, dare I say charm and beauty? Here disclosure quickly shifts to obscurance at every turn resisting the viewers ability to absorb the totality of the obscured text. The fleeting words and birds play hide and seek with the viewer and the idea of "play" operates here in multiple registers. In her essay for the MOMA exhibition Thought is Form: the Drawings of Joseph Beuys Bernice Rose observed that “Beuys designated all of life as a creative activity...with humanity as its central subject.” I cant help think that Barwin's oeuvre moves in similar ways in its broad methodology, organic depth and deep sense of humanity and the cosmos.