Steven Baldi “Life as Canon Sees It”

Steven Baldi “Life as Canon Sees It”

Koenig & Clinton

This event has ended.

Koenig & Clinton presents Steven Baldi’s second solo exhibition with the gallery.

Life as Canon Sees It introduces a new series of works on paper that explore technical aspects of paint and letterform. All works hang on a single wall beneath a phantom drop ceiling that the artist has engineered specifically for the gallery. Both aesthetic elements of the installation extend and reframe the artist’s previous series of photographs and site-specific paintings Branded Light.

In the previous series, the artist turned the printed photograph ‘inside out’ by revealing the makers of its constitutive materials (film, paper, filter, lens) and then scaled each gallery wall into the form of a painting to invoke the original camera obscura. In Baldi’s latest series light is no longer directly branded, it is now ambient and colored. Cast through a bright red scrim of the floating ceiling, the rose tint that fills the room creates a distinct environment in which to encounter the new works. The gentle tint also mimics the visual character of transitional light.

As is often the case with physically perceiving light in space (i.e. a sunset, a vast horizon), photographic documentation delivers only a part of experience. The scope is always too narrow; the spectrum too compressed. No filter will suffice. Yet, in its most iconic advertisement, “Wildlife as Canon Sees It”, the Canon camera company asserts that capturing and disseminating images of the natural world becomes an essential, if not to say an ethical, act. With the aid of their equipment, photography’s capacity for preservation extends beyond mere documentation. A mechanical lens emboldens our sight while it also heightens our environmental awareness.

Unfortunately, it is the very persistence of this campaign - the longest running in magazine history - that also signals the failed inevitability of wildlife appreciation, which begs the question, is a sharper focus enough? How might site bear upon the intelligibility of an image and its subjects? Stepping back from the viewfinder, Baldi redirects his gaze towards the mechanisms and machinations of a photographic world.

By parsing out and playing with their ‘identifying marks’, the artist unhinges the visual identities of what have been the world’s most sought after camera brands. Integrating digital and analogue image-making techniques, he manually flattens, skews, and shifts the vector-based components across the space of the page. Pushed to the edge of legibility, Bouma-shapes break apart, float, and then recombine.

A madcap reconfiguring of typography emerges as the process of transcription is subsumed by paint.

Steven Baldi (b. 1983, Huntington Beach, CA) holds a BFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. His work has been the subject of recent solo and two-person exhibitions at Thomas Duncan Gallery, Los Angeles; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Vox Populi Gallery, Philadelphia; and White Columns, New York. He has participated in select group exhibitions at: The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; NSU Museum, Ft. Lauderdale; Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York; Raucci Santamaria, Naples, IT; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut, LB; Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York; Simon Preston, New York; and Room East, New York. The artist lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

Media

• Painting

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