Try Keeping an Open Channel

×

Expand

Archie Barry, Dream for Reed (2025), video still (courtesy of the artist)

Sep 6 — Nov 22, 2025

Try Keeping an Open Channel

Archie Barry

Field: Exhibition

Location: Gallery, Western Front

Admission: Free

Opening Reception: Saturday, Sep 6, 2025, 6:00 – 8:00 p.m.

Western Front is pleased to present Try Keeping an Open Channel, a solo exhibition by Australian artist Archie Barry. Featuring three new video works and an artist’s book, the exhibition reflects on themes of death, disembodiment, and transness to consider modes of perception and connection that exceed rationalism.

The “channel” of the title conjures multiple forms: a video signal, a waterway, a dream, or an altered state of consciousness. Each video similarly serves as a portal to a minor history. Second Line Work revisits Barry’s childhood within The School of Practical Philosophy; Dream for Reed reflects on the inner life of pioneering trans philanthropist Reed Erickson through his archives of writings, self-portraits, and poetry; and Water Builds Bridges draws on Barry’s own memories of loss and near-death experience.

Across the works, Barry engages technologies that evoke states of being out-of-body or out-of-time—green screen compositing, psychotropic substances, astral projection, and Erickson’s fictional ASCID (Altered State of Consciousness Induction Device) imagined as a rotary telephone in a garden—to shape trans visions that resist the framework of visibility. By prioritizing sensing over explaining, Barry inquires into the limits and possibilities of representation and corporeality, giving new expression to the vibrancy, uneasiness, and complexity of trans life and loss.

Visit westernfront.ca for more information.