Richard Barlow and the Manipulation of Meaning
2011 / City pages / By Sheila regan

"Taken as a whole, the works Barlow each have intrinsic beauty in their own right, but what is great about the exhibit is the way that the artist challenges the viewer to think about how people perceive things, illustrating both the image-maker's role in manipulating artworks, but also in the power the viewer has to bring their own perception to the experience."

The Sylvan Screen: Richard Barlow and Regan Golden
2010 / exhibition catalog essay / By Dr. Jane Blocker

" ...Rich Barlow's work contemplates the scene of ownership and knowledge from a different vantage.   Rather than making photographs of a landscape, he collects 12" record album covers, which employ various land and seascapes that Roland Barthes would have called mythological.   Mythologies are, for Barthes, the "decorative display of what-goes-without-saying , the ideological abuse" which is hidden in the naturalness of images. Barlow reproduces these familiar, sometimes generic pictures, such as the cover from the Cure's 1980 single "A Forest," with silver leaf on layers of vellum.   The resulting works are at once intentionally clichéd landscapes, freighted, as I said before, with all manner of leaden allusions, and complex conceptual images that, like Golden's photographs, undermine the viewer's easy possession of the places they depict. "

Venture into the Woods
2010 / TC Daily Planet / By Mason riddle

" ...each "cover" has been drained of any indentifying information- text, artist, or visual detail. We are left with a landscape in silhouette, a landscape flattened, reflective, and constantly shifting as we shift viewpoints. The eye strains to identify the images' elements and, for music buffs, the album itself. Something understood and remembered as so common is now out of reach. Where the deep woods is metaphorically and literally about entering, we are now left out, excluded by the flat shimmering and abstract surface. It is neither fearful nor inviting; conceptually it is no more or less than what is offered. It simply is. "

The Metro 100
2010 / Metro Magazine / By Chuck terhark, chris clayton and mary o'regan

"Call it Extreme Home Makeover for the contemporary art set. Every few months or so, Lisa Bergh and Andrew Nordin turn their New London, Minn. home into a public art installation by artists of their choosing. Past invitees include Debora Miller, whoprojected nature photos onto the home's exterior, and Richard Barlow, whose floor-to-ceiling wall paintings were a scream."

From the Home Front
2010 / Public Art Review / By Jon Spayde

"Other icons proliferated in our towns last summer and fall. Richard Barlow completed a black-and-white [sic] mural near Powderhorn Park in south Minneapolis that highlights haunting, grainy details from a landscape image by nineteenth century photographic pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot."

Culture Crawl
2010 / architecture Minnesota / By matthew and jen kreilich

"Minneapolis is one big summer art gallery, thanks to muralists like Broken Crow and the adventurous building owners who provide the canvases."

Landescape at Thomas Barry
2009 / Art Review and Preview / By Andy Sturdevant

"The presence and absence of people in the natural world is central to a series of silver-leaf assemblages on vellum by Rich Barlow entitled Covers. Barlow has taken a series of both well-known and obscure LP album covers depicting outdoor scenes and removed the text and human figures, stripping them down to simple natural surroundings. Removing the artists entirely from the natural settings of their album covers creates a paradox that both confirms and undermines their personal stances on their place in the natural world."

Landescape: Rich Barlow's "Covers"
2009 / eyeteeth / By paul schmelzer

"Barlow's "Covers" series, part of the group show Landescape now on view at Minneapolis' Thomas Barry Gallery, plays with notions of landscape and subtly suggests an interrogation of what landscape is and how we ascribe significance -- or commonly in the realm of rock records, myth. [...] this series seems not to grasp for meaning but to muddle it in dreamy layers of vellum and foil, raising more questions than answers. "

Fighting Graffiti with Murals
2009 / MPR / By Marianne Combs

"In a wide alley of the Powderhorn Park neighborhood, artist Richard Barlow is almost finished painting a mural. It's not your typical brightly colored neighborhood pride statement. This mural is silver and white, and depicts the negative - and positive - of a photograph of trees on water. Barlow says he's been fascinated with how early photographers sought to be "painterly" in their images. Now Barlow's creating paintings inspired by those photographs."

Review Revue
2008 / Art Review and Preview / By Ariel Pate

"Daily Bromides, the postcard series, repeats Henry Fox Talbot's Trees Reflected in Water, one of the earliest examples of landscape photography. In some respects they invoke classic painterly discipline like that of Monet, whose daily haystacks are never the same; but it is also an interesting mental exploration of the relationship between painting and photography. Trees Reflected was intended to resemble a painting -- photography had yet to find the power of its verite. The Daily Bromides find interest in the observational acuity photographs take for granted. Bromide in the title becomes a pun and adds meaning as such: it was a chemical used in the creation of daguerreotypes, the repetitive nature of photo, the early impulse for photographers to imitate paint."

Territories Real and Imagined
2008 / MNartists.org / By Mason Riddle

"Using LP album covers as his point of departure, Barlow appropriates their landscape images, rendering them anew as square-format works in silver metallic leaf on vellum, stripped of any titles or names. The resulting reductive image is ghostly, even eerie; and when viewed in a group of 25, the series accrues a collective visual power that extends beyond any individual work. Devoid of color and text, these no longer suggest particular musicians or songs of an album cover, but exist more like an echo or shadow, evocative of a conceptual, rhythmic passage of time."

Piece of Cake
2008 / Daily Candy

Browse four categories (collectible, hangable, readable, wearable) for pieces like Brenna Burns’s baby buck ink drawings, Richard Barlow’s Book of Knots, and pistol-packing silver necklaces by Anomaly jeweler Karen Yost. Outré creations like Kirk Stoller’s intestinally suggestive sculpture are best viewed in person.

Summertime Blues, Mauves and a Little Gold Leaf
2007 / MNartists.org / By Mason Riddle

"Richard Barlow’s mixed-media-on-panel painting Silver Bromide (2007) recalls in spirit a stylized landscape painting by the Arts & Crafts painter Arthur Wesley Dow. In fact, it is closely based on a black-and-white landscape photograph by the nineteenth-century English photographer Henry Fox Talbot. Bathed in a luminous golden glow, the painting depicts a row of dark shadowy trees whose reflections are seen in the glassy surface of a lake. Photographers of Talbot’s era frequently worked in a dreamy, pictorial mode to emulate the qualities of painting. Barlow’s Silver Bromide has taken the conceit one step further by creating in paint what was originally a moody, romantic photograph. That the work is named for the emulsion coating photographic print paper is a witty touché. An image of Talbot’s original photograph would have made for a nice context."

'Biennial 23’ Really 14 Small Shows in One
2005 / South Bend Tribune


Use Whatever You Have
2005 / Minnesota Daily / By Claire Joseph