Artillery Magazine November 2020
November 2021 Artillery Magazine
"As we chatted about breasts, doppelgängers and reclaiming the male gaze, it became clear in “Virgin Soap” Szwarc both measures with and holds the strings; her artist’s hands exuding the power of a puppeteer’s, the delicacy of a surgeon’s stitch, and—like The Fates at their wheel—weaves another world where a woman can regard and be regarded in all her animal mystery."
Art Reviews
Los Angeles
Velvet Revolution: Yasmine Nasser Diaz
Desire Encapsulated
All of Them Witches
Artillery Magazine, May 2020
"Considering this, the anachronisms of her work move beyond aesthetic play and serve to capture experiencing time in a new way, or rather, a way that rings truer. I asked Barker if we might indulge a term like “female apocalypse,” and if so, did she feel it existed outside of an isolated event: was the female apocalypse ever-present? Barker expressed, what matters most is the fluidity of time for women, made more apparent when set against nature, as the beautiful must also contain complicated things, violence and disorder, so in this way: it is happening, has happened, will happen at once."
The Handbag's Tale,The Atlantic
April 2017
"Unlike the Birkin sleuth, I indulged their emotions. A Birkin priest hearing confessions of obsession, of greed, of guilt—especially the old relationships and bad choices that had facilitated the bag’s acquisition in the first place. Even the expensive Birkin, with its implications of wealth and therefore choice, might just as much imply imprisonment. Just as an onlooker might question a young woman coupled to an old man, a Birkin on the arm can say, “the bag chose me, not the other way around.”
