The Long Dissolve, 2000/2011

"I shot the video in 2000, in my home in SoHo. I knew prior to shooting what I wanted to do, and I envisioned the piece exactly as it turned out. First, I experimented with a metal cookie tin placed on a hot stove. It didn't work because the ice cube melted too quickly. I tried a hairdryer, but as the cube melted, the hair-blower blew the remaining cube away. Thus, I let the cube melt on its own accord in real time. It took about three hours to fully dissolve into a puddle of water. I used a glass plate on Glassene paper: all that transparency made the black lines of the plate look like a charcoal line drawing. The title is important because it precisely explains the work: The Long Dissolve is exactly of an ice cube dissolving." - Burt Barr

Claiming that "black and white are the only two colors I'll ever need," Burt Barr is a believer in the single take and the static shot. Meant to be projected directly onto a wall and looped for continual viewing, his films equate more to hanging drawings or black and white photographs than they are moving pictures. Observing the mundane aspects of the world with a sense of humor—he once made a video of paint drying on a wall, in real time—his works are characterized by their slow fade-ins and fade-outs. They play on the absurdity of contemporary life's rapid pace, and beg us to slow down, to take a breather in the midst of our frenetic days.

Burt Barr has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofí­a, Madrid, Spain; Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul, Turkey; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. Other installations have taken place at The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA; and the USF Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL. Barr is the recipient of numerous awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts, The American Film Institute, The Andrea Frank Foundation, The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, and The Massachusetts Council on the Arts & Humanities. In Summer 2008, he was a visiting artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. He is currently working on separate sets for the choreographers Trisha Brown and Jodi Melnick, as well as a 40-foot-long print for Graphicstudio at the University of South Florida in Tampa Bay.

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