Barry's work has links to
conceptual art,
feminist performance art, critical theory and cinema studies. Critics define Barry's practice as much in relation to cultural theory and methodology as through aesthetic issues. the influence of architectural space and urban planning on identity, social behavior and power relations; insistence on a participatory, meaning-productive spectator;
Individual works and installations Visual theorist
Johanna Drucker identified "voyeurism, spectacle, the power of display and the seductive apparatus of projection" as central to Barry's work—themes evident in her early video,
Casual Shopper (1981–82). Both large-scale, double-sided projections, they melded imagery of shopping malls and high-rise exteriors and interiors with window-like insertions of fragmented film narratives. Barry's use of contradictory vantage points inside and outside the same physical and visual spaces in those works highlights her emphasis on kinesthetic and perceptual rather than idealized visual paradigms (e.g., perspectival vision) for meaning-making—an approach that often requires spectators to navigate physical parameters and conflicting modes of signification. For example, in
Model for Stage and Screen (1987), she considered the functional effects of architecture, asking spectators to step into a large circular chamber containing a glowing pillar of green light. Upon exiting, rather than return to normal vision they experienced a purely perceptual, intense series of afterimages, suspending them between different ways of "seeing."
Imagination, dead imagine (Fundació La Caixa and Nicole Klagsbrun, 1991;
Mary Boone Gallery, 2018) emphasized movement, but more insistently, foregrounded a visceral, corporeal "infection" of its own pristine form and exhibition space. The installation consisted of a 10-foot mirrored cube wrapped with four (or five) rear-projection screens depicting a seemingly caged, androgynous head (in frontal, back and profile views) being successively flooded with muck resembling bodily fluids and insects, with each defilement followed by a video wipe restoring a cleansed face. Made at the height of the
AIDS crisis and that era's terror of bodily fluids, it referenced work by writers
Samuel Beckett and
J. G. Ballard, theorist
Julia Kristeva's concept of the
abject and
Robert Morris's
minimalist mirrored cubes. Charles Hagen of
The New York Times described its narrative dimension as "exploring the charged territory, prominent in infantile psychology, where the erotic and the scatological overlap … as the mammoth, enigmatic head suffers the plague of indignities … with a compelling, almost heroic impassiveness."
"Not Reconciled" series and related projects In projects such as
Border Stories (2001/2006) and
Cairo Stories (2003–11), Barry focused on the narratives of individuals from diverse cultures and their formation in relation to the politics of nation-states.
Cairo Stories (Sharjah Biennial, 2011) was developed collaboratively from video interviews of more than 200 Cairene women of different social and economic classes between the
2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the
2011 Egyptian Revolution. The resulting video and photographic portraits chronicled largely untold stories ranging across political hope and empowerment, the complexities of family life and class, and personal hardship. She took a different approach with
Untitled: (Global displacement: nearly 1 in 100 people worldwide are displaced from their homes) (2018), an intricate digital collage displayed as a three-story banner on the façade of the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Prompted by drone photos of people adrift in precarious boats that proliferated during the
2015 European migrant crisis, Barry recast the scenario with images she took of museum goers looking up and smiling, then superimposed a 2016 Pew Center report headline (the title), connecting viewers to people displaced by disasters around the world and in the U.S. == Exhibition design ==