Brenda Baker + Bird Ross

media release: Arts + Literature Laboratory presents Land of 1,000 Eddies, an exhibition by Brenda Baker and Bird Ross, from Tuesday, January 9, 2024 through Thursday, March 7, 2024.

A reception for new exhibitions, including artist talks, will be held Thursday, January 18 from 6:00pm to 8:00pm.

Exhibition Statement

What exactly is an eddy?

Eddies are circular and constantly moving. They can be a trap. They can be a place for rest. You’ll find them in rivers and oceans. Or in your mind, ideas swirling, resting, gaining speed, spinning out of control, then finding solace again. Even a traffic circle can feel like an eddy. Or maybe it’s a meal you’re about to consume or a letter you’ve just read that leaves you restful or hurried, spinning, or calm.

Studios can be eddies. Our shelter, our storm. Our trap, our rest. Where we are most flummoxed, most alive, or most relieved.

Here’s where we landed. In the middle. In the Land of 1,000 Eddies.

We navigated our internal waters and fostered these works over the past many months. We hope they will be a place for your curiosity and rest.

Artist Statements

Brenda Baker: My work intuitively dances between the known and unknown, the spoken and unspoken, the hidden and the exposed. I work in layers of paint and beeswax, scraping, painting, carving and layering over and over again, simultaneously revealing and concealing what went before, akin to the way memory is both evoked and lost, specific and hazy.

Though resolutely abstract, my work is both landscape and figurative, huddling in that space between clarity and fog, memory and forgetting, with ambiguous, ragged edges. I always start with an imposed narrative prompt and structure as a jumpingoff point: a piece of text, song lyrics, a shopping list, a journal entry, my mother’s calendar. From there I work my way out, finding places of clarity, refuge, using organic forms and repetitive, overlapping lines that allude to the nature world and patterns that mark time. I respond to each mark and color that went before in a kind of lyrical improvisation.

Painting is my way of playing with ideas and forms and momentarily stopping time.

Bird Ross: I sew, plant, tape, combine, construct and deconstruct mundane objects and materials in order to resolve problems, create problems and ask questions. I probe dilemmas from multiple perspectives. I’m interested in the useful and the useless, the oblique and the obvious and how they collide. 

I often resolve issues employing:

narratives, 2 and 3-dimensional design and aesthetics, communicating,

presentations and delivery, dressing, and combining.

I consider:

layers, humble and stumbled-upon materials, collaborators, the alphabet, fabric and

every color of thread.

Among the things I appreciate are:

Needleandthread (oneword), the pencil, the bicycle, the hole punch, a trusty sewing

machine, good walking shoes, humans and a good challenge.