EXHIBITION IMAGES | PRESS RELEASE
July 8 – 31, 2023 | 79a Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY
Opening reception, Saturday, July 8, 5 – 7 pm
Halsey McKay is honored to present Time To Be Still, Teresa Baker’s first exhibition with the gallery. Baker deftly uses texture, shape, and color guided by her Mandan/Hidatsa culture to explore how identity and place can be present in innate objects. On view are two of her signature mixed-media works and three framed drawings on ledger paper. In both her large wall works and her drawing practice, Baker responds to her materials and makes decisions in relation to their inherent characteristics. Each new piece acts as a puzzle to solve, made up of clues like commercially produced artificial turf, or paper found in her late mother-in-law’s CPA legers.
It’s a physical and intuitive process for Baker, looping back and forth with these disparate objects, following their lead in the studio. Focusing on capturing space in her work, Baker leaves large swaths of the ground showing, and then hones in on details and subtleties within. Her process-based investigation defies the boundaries of a rectilinear canvas, bringing autonomy to each work. Neither predictable nor arbitrary, no two shapes are the same, and all knowingly nod to the implication of mapped geographic territory. Natural materials, such as buckskin, willow, buffalo hide, parfleche, and for the first time, beads, are brought into the work, allowing her additional ways to explore texture, while simultaneously grounding her objects in a long tradition of meaning, both functional and spiritual. Her selection of rugged industrial materials forced into relations with more delicate and natural partners serves a hopeful vision for our world – at once abject and beautiful. This aspirational joy is furthered in these newest works through brightly saturated and calmly pitched hues that dileneate landscapes ripe for play and meditation on their horizons. Scale is used to envelop the viewer and invites us to slow down and be bathed in her work as in a forest, big sky, or sea.
Teresa Baker (Mandan/Hidatsa, B. 1985 Watford City, ND) currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Baker has had recent solo exhibitions at de boer, Los Angeles, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Pied-à-terre, San Francisco; and Interface Gallery, Oakland; Group exhibitions include Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; Marin MoCA, Novato, CA, and Anthony Meier, Mill Valley, CA. She will be included in the upcoming edition of Made in LA: Acts of Living, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA. Baker is a 2022 Joan Mitchell Fellow, the 2022 Artist-in-Residence at FOGO Islands Arts in Newfoundland, and the recipient of the 2020 Native American Fellowship for Visual Artists at the Ucross Foundation. Baker was Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell and a Tournesol Award Artist-in-Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work is held in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Baker received her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BA from Fordham University. She is represented in Los Angeles by de boer Gallery.