In her debut solo exhibition, Twilight Sleep, at Venvi Art Gallery in Tallahassee, Florida, Carrie Ann Baade presents imagery that reflects on the female experience. She does not shy away from difficult and real-life issues, which are represented by allegorical symbols and figures in collage-like compositions. Her paintings are considered autobiographical as well with first-person storytelling throughout.
Angelface, oil on canvas, 48 x 36"
“Within this body of work [Twilight Sleep] are themes of female aberrations, the irreconcilable, the struggle of becoming conscious and the goddess being drowned. The concepts behind this new work are informed by a lack of women’s voices in the past and their lack of agency,” says Baade. “I could never understand why my mother would not or could not speak of my birth. After much questioning, she finally told me it was because she doesn’t remember it; she was one of the last women to be given ‘twilight sleep,’ which causes an amnesic state. While they experience the pain, they do not recall it later. I am relating this method of being drugged during childbirth to the sleep of female genius during patriarchy. When men ruled the world and the home, women were repressed and their inability to have agency was incapacitating, some to the point of madness.”
Powers and Dominions, oil and gold leaf on panel, 40 x 30"
Baade also uses her paintings in a way that is similar to Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories, which is about animals that were modified in form by acts of human or magical beings. She elaborates, “I use my paintings to explain the circumstances for women that informed their personal power or made them magical beings. They can be dangerous, large, powerful or trapped, forlorn and drowning. Yet, in each vignette, I am trying to expand their story, and give them a new imagined life. Paintings provide one of those special places where you can create believable worlds that can be made real in their creation. They exist to invent possibilities and expand imagination. I hope through these images, I am contributing to the stories and visualizations that inform women’s identities...good and bad are less important than beguiling and minacious. The goal is not to put the viewer to sleep but to inform their dreams and their nightmares.”
Self-portrait with Big Eyes and Tiny Man, oil on canvas, 48 x 36"
Among her paintings for the show are Angelface, Caritas and Self-portrait with Big Eyes and Tiny Man, which are immediately reflective of her artistic process and motivations. “In graduate school, I had one of those breakdowns that were indistinguishable from the breakthrough. I got out my scissors, cut up my artbooks and made original collages of the paintings. However, figuring out what to do from there was a process. It required trial and error to make it work,” she explains.
Baade adds, “Maybe I am still in the process of comprehending what cutting up an existing image and making a new thing means or does. There is a violence to the old and a creation of the new. It’s synergistic, it’s being a mad scientist, it’s conjuring; it’s also a bit like a tarot reading from the fallen fragments. But also, it is making inquiries out of injuries. If I truly solved or understood anything completely about what I was doing, I would likely quit doing it. The chase is toward mystery and this process allows it.”
Twilight Sleep runs through January 9. —
Venvi Art Gallery
2901 E. Park Avenue • Tallahassee, FL 32301
(850) 322-0965 • www.venviartgallery.com
Powered by Froala Editor
