Baker Artist Portfolios

This limited selection of photos comes a larger body of photographs from the opening night of my first solo exhibition entitled 'Portals.' 'Portals' debuted on November 17th, 2017 at the iconic yet now-shuttered NuBohemia Black-owned gallery and coffeehouse on West Biddle Street. The paintings featured in the exhibit were designed as doors, which invited viewers to enter into a new state of being and mind. Blank journals were placed at the foot of every painting, and attendees filled the journals with their reflection on where each piece had taken them.

The things it carried is a portrait of a body in process. It is peeled back body, unreleased body, dissipated body, healing body, courier body, forming body and much much more. And still, the woman, the soft fire woman grows till tall, till broken, till strong. She clasped her hands and screamed to God and prayed that the sun remain; even if it burned her even if it burned you, even if it melted the shadow from our bones. She prayed you the summer, breathed you in like solace (you, with your scar tissue body).

This series addresses the symbols and ideas of the apocalypse in a present act of transformation. It exists in the moment when the ethereal meets the earthly, the magical meets the mundane, the macrocosm meets the microcosm, when the veil lifts and the hidden meets the visible and the mental breakdown is a spiritual revelation.

I started planning this piece back in May of 2020, when I saw the news that an 84-year-old elderly Asian woman was jump kicked in the face by teens at a bus stop in Minnesota for absolutely no reason other than her looks. When COVID first reached the US, I was consistently seeing my Asian friends suffer from harassment because of it, whether it was from homeless people yelling slangs at them or people making slant-eyed gestures towards them. These stories brought back many memories from my childhood growing up in Pennsylvania when others bullied me for being Chinese.

I love books.   Always have.  I love how they smell and feel, their different textures and sizes, the way they weigh in my hands and lap, and the foreplay of their pages against my fingertips.  I love the personality of their Titles  and  colorful covers and even their solid-colored covers with no text—that’s so sexy. And how their inner parts get laid, overlaid, blocked,  flushed, and  s           t           r           e           w           n   across the territory of pages for readers’ consumption.  The more delicious the content, the better.                 
 

"Whimsy" is a series that stems from "Proximity" and it examines the closeness between creatures and structures. I hope this series makes you smile.