Lilac Chaser

with Anita Douthat

Baker’s new works collapse notions of digital detritus into antiquated Rust Belt sentiment to reckon with one’s ability to speak around the idea of environmental catastrophe instead of through it. These works continue his practice of pitting hand-rendering against digital reproduction processes. The use of multiple rigid binaries is an ongoing autobiographical structure in his work.

The floral vase paintings confront the viewer like a Trojan horse virus, innocuous and facile. They originate from Norfolk Southern purchasing one hundred floral arrangements following the derailment in East Palestine, Ohio in 2023. This temporal good-will gesture was designed to disappear but has instead been documented as a static memorial wielding the weight of oil painting. The vase references are conjured from texts using Midjourney as a generative tool to be translated through the labor of the hand. He is leveraging media and artifice through representation with the blunt force of a bucolic landscape painted on a rusty antique saw blade that adorned many Midwestern Grandparent’s living rooms in the 1980’s. Baker is reimagining these arrangements with a close-enough realism that intends to seduce the eye and defy scrutiny, like the believability of actor Fadi Abi Samra as Walid Raad’s 6th hostage (1.)

In these new works on paper Baker complicates his previous monoprinting process by hand-painting all the black forms using India ink. This step is followed by the rapid gestural transfer of a digital film print to paper using acrylic gel medium with a variety of mark making tools. These works fetishize the dots, patterns, and distortions that digital compression and editing of found photographs create. The hand becomes more apparent in these works as it offers more contrast to the digitally reproduced color systems in the film transfer. The monoprints build compositions cluttered with landscapes, heavy machinery, fragments of figures, and handwritten temporary closure signage on mom-and-pop storefronts. These overly congested compositions beg for a futile act of decoding, like the blur of driving past rural depressed outbuildings with decades of decaying objects and clutter.

1. The Atlas Group (Walid Raad), Hostage: The Bachar tapes (#17 and #31)_English version, 2000.