Baker Artist Portfolios

Installation @Site:Lab The Public Museum, Grand Rapids MI

In my work, I use materials from daily life, objects that have cultural associations and points of reference for viewers. I explore the tension between the cerebral concerns of minimalism and an investigation of humanity: emotional, spiritual, symbolic, and narrative. At its core, the work is a meditation on entropy, time, loss, decay, renewal, and survival.

Bonnie Crawford's Light Emitting Studies 2015 consist of hand stitched soft sculptures, painted wood, cheap craft materials, and electrical circuits. The electronic components used to control the lights are free form soldered as elements of the sculptural composition. Tiny sensors in the circuits respond to the ambient light in the room to alter the rate of the blinking lights.

Renewal: a word we often use but rarely consider. This mixed media sculpture was the culmination of the work made during an artist residency at Nes in Skagaströnd, Iceland. The fabric that was used were the scraps from a small business that produced custom-made uniforms in the region. When I arrived, they had just completed nurse uniforms, and that left me with bags of white scraps that I hand painted. The paintings were a reflection of the natural elements that are in abundance in the countryside: water, wind, and horses.

A constant stream, the flow of life, a symbiotic relation to its environment.
This series captures the movement and flow of events in my family and through my life.

The playwright Erik Ehn writes "The unspeakable is speakable if we admit to the viability of the word smashed open." I use puppetry and my art to investigate important issues in the world. These two projects, one of which is ongoing, investigate the effects of genocide and asthma and losing the ability to breathe.

A puppet production of Erik Ehn's "The Architecture of Great Cathedrals". Ehn's play is the surreal story of an American prison guard on vacation in genocide scarred Guatamala.

Through object puppetry and music, Reverse Cascade tells the story of world renowned juggler Judy Finelli. Circus and juggling objects - balls, scarves, rings, clown noses - compose the characters and the world of a physically disciplined circus performer at the height of her career and as her body begins to betray her. Multiple sclerosis weighs her down and tears her apart, and she must figure out a new identity now that her tool for performance has vanished.

Our current cultural and political climate is fraught with tension, our lives increasingly more stressful, and the world more hectic. These truths demand our constant effort and attention. Thus, it’s important - and difficult – to take time to replenish our mental, physical, and emotional reservoirs. Nature offers humanity reprieve and provides pictorial and poetic narratives: a moss blanket comforts a broken soul; a nest bursts from and engulfs a birdcage; a large-scale, site-specific, wall mounted mandala comprised of a thousand golden lotus seedpods begs the viewers to find stillness in contemplation; a wall of multicolored baskets symbolize our need to constantly hold and care for ourselves, especially when difficult life experiences arise; and, two smaller mandalas – one made of seeds, the other of Bodhi (ficus religiosa) leaf skeletons – speak of ritual and meditation. Transformed into visual expressions, materials become metaphors for these psychological associations. Each work relies on the repetition and expansion of a fundamental unit to explore the relationship of the physical to the psychological. In all the works, less is more. Spare forms and conceptual innuendo swiftly carry each work into the bio-philosophic. They establish connections between the inside and outside of the body and mind to consider our larger relationship to the natural world. The  organic matter featured in this body of work metaphorically symbolize our collective human fragility; our need to be cared for and healed. 

JIM OPASIK'S Head series is based on imaginary subjects.