Judith Barry’s video installation, imagination, dead imagine, opens with the sound of labored breathing, followed by a gurgling cascade of liquid pouring down upon the head of a person of indeterminate gender seen from five sides on a giant cube of screens. The subject endures the onslaught with eyes closed but also with an impassive expression, as if this were all in a day’s work. We never see who’s doing the pouring, but it’s repeated again and again with a different substance each time: Water, flour and, perhaps most disturbingly, maggots.
There’s a fluid dissolve between each round, and at one point the sequence runs backward, so the face goes from wet to dry. Barry, who has taken the title from a Samuel Beckett story that’s at once visceral and austere in its depiction of two bodies confined inside a vault, offers her victim no respite from the torture.
Echoing a host of works by other artists—Hermann Nitsch, Bruce Nauman, Marina Abramović— imagination, dead imagine keeps onlookers at a remove, allowing us a multiplicity of views with no idea of specific context. Is the cube a prison? A stage? A studio? The artist isn’t saying.