REWIND

 Bonnie Baxter: Rewind

by Christine Unger

Bonnie Baxter’s evolution as an artist might best be described with the phrase “punctuated equilibrium” where steady aesthetic and technical development is marked by sudden radical shifts. Around ten years ago one of those radical shifts saw the highly respected and successful printmaker begin to experiment with video and performance. Rewind represents a decade of transformative exploration in multiple mediums. Her process links her to a generation of artists finding a way to connect with the digital world – observing with the objectivity of the camera eye and simultaneously becoming the object of the “gaze” – embracing the immediate, the experiential. Atmospheric, haunting and a little humorous, her investigations in new media are rewound for the viewer, deconstructed and re-established in her most recent bodies of print. The show charts a progression of ideas that are neither static nor strictly linear. By artful slight of hand, Baxter creates profound connections – seamlessly layering disparate content and tactile experiences. Her subject matter reveals not only a profound involvement with world events but a personal vision that refuses to see any aspect of life as less important than another. Her finely honed printmaker’s ability to produce imagery in complex layers allows her to relate the most mundane experiences to the most exalted and profound. There is an inevitable existentialism in her work where the transcendent and the terrible are arbitrated with humour. Even the work which confronts the most hostile acts of humanity is mediated with the perspective of time implied by the combination of print techniques she applies – each eliciting their own tactile memory of historical place – the pixel precision of the digital now – the etched and ragged lines of simpler pasts.

Rewind is focused through a single mystical sculpture reminiscent of Peter Breugel’s tower of babel. The artistic achievements of a decade are presented as a sculpture out of which small video monitors peer – “rewinding” fragments of past works.

A sound installation will audibly mimic the babel of images through a ferment of sounds. Images of entrances and exits created from video stills taken in Hagia Sophia and the Topkapi Palace of the Ottoman sultans in Ístanbul are enlarged to a pointillist pixilation and transferred onto the transparent medium of Lexan. Appearing, life size, throughout the exhibitions space, they create a dreamlike illusion, suggesting the artist’s own passage as she continues to look for ways to understand and describe her world.

Contributing to the theme of ingress are the door shaped prints selected from Baxter’s various series. Synchronized video footage collected over the years from various parts of the world including Istanbul, New York, and Montréal, will be projected on the wall. The sense of perspective and psychological complexity are deepened through the mytho-historical and socio-political references that suffuse her work. Small sculptures of her Chi-chi doggie will companion the audience as the Chi-chi has come to companion the artist in her exploration of difficult subject matter.

Like a film run backwards, the images of this exhibition rewind the course of a decade through the eyes of the artist. Through passageways – real and imagined – of an intimately lit exhibition space, we are reminded that nothing has been lost but simply deconstructed to create a rich diversity – not a Babel, but rather nations of thought, languages of expression which enrich each other through their differences and the insights which their juxtapositions elicit.

The history of printmaking is revealed in the layers of her newest prints. Techniques and imagery that are ostensibly incompatible find common ground. Her images push the technical boundaries of print using digital processes, UV inks, large scales and unorthodox surfaces. At the same time she layers this work with the most ancient forms of the printmaker’s art with stamps, and woodblock printing.

Through the correlation of objects, prints, and video images,this show bridges the gaps between traditional and experimental mediums. It mediates the boundaries between objective and subjective representation, the mundane and the transcendent, gravity and humour, the artists commitment to social engagement and the need to find comfort and reason through aesthetic expression.