Caroline Beasley-Baker is an installation
artist and painter. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions
in New York City and across the US as well as in England. She has done
large scale installation projects for the Everson Museum (Syracuse, NY)
and Creative Time (New York City) among others. In the 1990s she
collaborated with choreographer Bebe Miller creating work that was
presented at the Joyce Theater and Danspace in New York City and at the
Kennedy Center and the Boston Ballet as well as other venues in the US and
Europe. She is currently the Visiting Artist for the Connecticut
State Universities, 2001-2002.
She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New
York Foundation for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts, the
Ford Foundation, and Artist's Space. The Jerome Lawrence and Robert
E. Lee Theatre Research Institute at Ohio State University has
recently collected the dance environments for their Performing Arts
Archives.
Reviews of her work have appeared in Arts Magazine, The Boston Globe,
The LA Times, The New York Times, The Village Voice and other US and
European newspapers.
Beasley-Baker has an MFA in Painting and Sculpture and an MA in Myth and
Folklore.
| Giotto's
House: At Night by the Fire. Room: 25'd x 19¹d x 19¹w x
50¹h. High-load acrylic paint, oil stick, and glitter on wood
panels and pressboard columns. Wood stairs with astro turf. A
small wood house. 4 1/2 tons of pea-sized coal. Projected
spiral nebula on vaulted ceiling. Lighting design: Douglas
O¹Flaherty. Creative Time/Art in the Anchorage, New York, NY. |
|
| Heaven
+ Earth. (Part 1). 18'x 13'. Curtain: Acrylic and fluorescent
paint, oil stick, and small mirrors on velour. Valence: Oil
stick on wood panels. Concept and and set/environment design
by CBB. Lighting: Michael Mazzola. Choreography: Bebe Miller.
Altogether Different, Joyce Theater, NYC. |
|
| Little
Krishna. 120' x 277'. Acrylic and fluorescent paint, oil
stick, china marker, plastic gems, and half pearls on wood
panels. Berisha Studio, Chelsea, NYC. From the series of
paintings, The Garden at Midnight. |
|
Artist's Statement:
I am currently at work on 2 series of paintings: The Garden at Midnight
and The Hem of Her Skirt.
The Garden at Midnight explores the relationship of ³heaven and earth²
as seen through various mythic figures and stories‹-presenting a visual,
mythological history that is also personal, poetic, and spiritual. The
style of this group of paintings draws on vernacular architecture and
decoration from the Hindu and Mexica cultures among others-‹a kind of
free-form compendium of related mythic styles‹-along with personally
derived symbolic-landscape and decorative elements.
Some of the paintings in the series will be used for a painting
environment with theatrical light. (The work is painted for varied
lighting and undergoes leaps in color and feeling under dramatic light. )
The Garden is a part of an ongoing series of painting environment
installations begun in 1988.
The Hem of Her Skirt is a series of small devotional paintings that grew
from improvisational extracts drawn from The Garden at Midnight paintings.
The Hem paintings are obsessively rendered with plastic gems, false
pearls, and porcelain roses that are used to signify the kind of
repetition and implied counting that is a part of saying mantras or
praying with prayer
beads.
Critics on the Painting Environments:
Beasley-Baker's [installation Between Land & Sky] is a place so
strongly focused on myth, imagery and dreams, on contemplation and ritual,
that details are irrelevant. Visitors were requested to remove their shoes
at the entrance, a simple but powerful gesture that established the
special character of the space. Despite the references to landscape and
open spaces, Between Land & Sky is as concentrated an interior as one
can imagine, and something like a temple. The strength of the piece is in
its emotional intensity and the convincing spiritual environment it
generates, but equally admirable if less evident is the compositional
skill with which the installation is organized and executed. Tremendously
diverse elements are held together with uncommon clarity and discipline
that make the installation form seem fresh, alive and free from the
excesses and confusion that sometimes overwhelmed the installations of the
1970s [and 80s]. This piece does not make an issue of its form, either,
but serenely creates its lavish effects with out fuss or argument.
Review Excerpt, Ellen Handy, Arts Magazine
One work that stands out is Caroline Beasley-Baker's Giotto's House, at
Night by the Fire... Hints of spiritual presences escape through the pores
or fissures of the meso-American inspired type of abstraction
Beasley-Baker undertakes. The reference to Giotto, in the title, lends
itself to the idea that the multicolored monumentality of the work is the
true, traditional way for art to invoke a spirit conceived of in animistic
terms. Indeed, the room has a certain unnameable tension in it, an
expectancy. The lighting, counterpointing mutually unfocusable blues and
reds, even spraying a galaxy of star nebula on the brick vaults, tries to
conjure different half-hallucinations from the adjusting eye. It¹s as if
one was in an ancient temple waiting for a god to show herself.
Review Excerpt, Robert Mahoney, New York Press |