NYAB Event - Glen Baldridge "Under Rock and Stone"

Glen Baldridge "Under Rock and Stone"

Krause Gallery

This event has ended.

Glen Baldridge’s work holds a sense of the sardonic, and a reverence and curiosity for the “outside.” His subject matter often redefines the perception of the abject, while his technical grounding and background in printmaking keeps an eye towards an artistic subculture rooted in virtuosic print and papermaking methodologies.

His fourth solo show with Klaus von Nichtssagend, "Under Rock and Stone," engages in themes of suburban alienation, dissolution of counterculture, and how the forest primeval relates to the American subconsciousness.

An installation of wooden clapboard siding greets visitors at the entrance to the gallery space. Where a sconce or motion light might normally illuminate the wall at night, Baldridge’s tongue-in-cheek sculptural light work mischievously lights the way.

Baldridge furthers his unique synthesis of photography, drawing, and printmaking with a series of pictures derived from images shot at night in rural New England with a game camera, which is automatically triggered by wind, insects, and otherwise unseen forces of the night. The subsequent photos are screenprinted onto sheets of graphite-covered watercolored paper. The graphite is erased away to reveal the image amid the yellow-green painted watercolor ground, evoking night vision and other haunting glows.

The woods here, devoid of human presence, stand in as places peripheral and out of bounds, bespeaking the early settlers' fears of the wilderness, both natural and otherwise—but also of drug-addled teenagers stumbling through a dark place devoid of parental supervision.

Hanging below the skylight of the gallery is an image of a tie-dyed t-shirt, fabricated from pigmented hand-made paper. The piece appears to have smashed through the skylight like a fallen youth who flew too close to the stars; its suspension in space causes it to double as a sundial and casting a shadow in motion over the gallery throughout the day, at times landing on a small honey bear sitting high on a shelf. Close inspection reveals it to be a slip-cast porcelain waterpipe, a hardened symbol of an icon of an American counterculture.