...and to draw a bright white line with light (Untitled 11.5), from the series "... and to draw a bright white line with light"

Since the early 1990s Uta Barth has observed the atmospheric and the incidental to focus attention on perception and the act of looking itself. This series originated, as do many of Barth’s projects, in her home, where she noticed the mesmerizing play of light as she drew her curtains. In a significant departure from her usual practice, however, she intervened in the scene, manipulating the curtains to create lines and curves of light that she photographed. The root meaning of the word photograph is “drawing or writing with light”; Barth’s images thematize that etymology. Presented as a sequence of panels, the photographs also imply the motion of time, with its mix of continuity and rupture.