Not at Liberty

STATEMENT
As a general principle Man Bartlett’s work uses duration and meditation as mediums. He’s interested in minimal actions that reflect on our present condition. 

In January of 2010 Bartlett took a trip to Liberty Island, recalling that it was a surreal experience to peer out of the head of the Statue of Liberty and that the scale was somehow both massive and miniscule. One of the photos he took from that trip (though not from inside Liberty’s head), is Torch. This photo is featured in the work HOT AIR, on display in the front window of the gallery. The title is a reference to the idiom “full of hot air,” suggesting that someone is “full of lies, exaggerations, or nonsense.”

In February of 2026, in the shadow of an authoritarian and fascistic administration actively disappearing people from United States soil, Bartlett traveled from his apartment in Washington Heights, Manhattan, past the Statue of Liberty, to Staten Island. For many people, this moment has arrived primarily through screens: mediated, fragmented, and relentless. The journey was a quiet meditation on proximity and remove, on what it means to move through the world as a body among other bodies while the state systematically dismantles the lives and futures of people it has deemed disposable. PASSING LIBERTY arrives as sound alone. It refuses the visual documentation of decline and asks the listener to be present to what cannot be fully seen, only felt.

The final work, ICE MELTS, used a hydrophone to record the sound of all the ice cubes from his freezer melting, eventually hastened by heat from his hands. The title is a direct reference to the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE), and the metaphorical methods that might be taken to dismantle it: patience, persistence, and determination.

The title of the show, "Not at Liberty," functions on two levels. The first is literal: Bartlett was not at the Statue of Liberty but passing by it on a ferry filled with tourists and locals. The second borrows the language of official evasion, the phrase deployed by politicians and intelligence officials to claim silence as protocol, for example, "I'm not at liberty to discuss the murder of U.S. citizens by ICE."