Miguel Gonzalez found in Alicia Barney's work a reinterpretation of the landscape, no longer bucolic, romantic paintings observed through the aesthetic gaze of early twentieth century artists, but rather an inquisitive, questioning, and provocative gaze. In Barney’s work, the concept replaces the object. The result is instead a process in which the materials signify the idea itself, which is not abstract matter, but part of reality, observed through her critical perspective. Materials are not used as metaphors, but as indexes, as a principle of reality where she coined the idea of the "shaman artist," one capable of interpreting them as anomalous elements, when they had already been over-naturalized: