Quotes

“The container, the contained, a vault of space overhead, emptiness, corporal display, gradations of light…I see in Barbara Kilpatrick’s work an enormous world of conceptual innuendoes that convey classic origins through modern materials and technology. The feel of location of this artist to her artwork with attendant voyeuristic privileges, brings on an exquisitely enigmatic set-up. The longer I look at the work the farther out I go.”

—Trisha Brown, 2006

“Barbara Kilpatrick’s work deliberately inhabits a realm where dance-theater and visual art coexist. Fascinated by the ambiguity, simultaneity and separateness of these terrains, her work may be seen through the metaphor of photography: fixed images retain the aura of lived time.”

—Susan Rosenberg, “Motion / Fixity”, Pierro Gallery, South Orange, New Jersey, 2009

“It’s not just Ms. Shick who is perfect. “Pathétique” is her seventh collaboration with the costume designer Barbara Kilpatrick and the sound designer Elise Kermani. This is one of the most reliably beguiling teams in dance. That consistency might seem to preclude surprise—each work is quite similar to the others—yet it is nevertheless surprising how these three, every time, find or make fresh magic."

—Brian Seibert, The New York Times, 2014

“For Barbara Kilpatrick, this dialectic stems from the transitory nature of life, wherein forms become surrogates and mediators for experience. Her sculptures, designs and performances allow an abstract object to convey literal and figurative projections, an engagement with material reality that stimulates a range of associations. Such work is not born of equivocation, but a belief in the power of ambiguity as an expressive and conceptual tool.”

—Daniel Haxall, “Shifting Paradigms: The New Arts Program and Kutztown University” 2015