SOFT MOVES
NEW WORK BY Casey Baden
Oct 21-Jan2 | Opening : Saturday, October 21, 3-6 pm
La Loma Projects Annex: 1357 Brixton Road, Pasadena, CA 91105 (By appointment only)
Casey Baden paints the feeling of being in a body. Her evocative acrylic tableaus feature figures that are not only subject to the shifting pressures and provocations of the physical world but also the pleasures and perils of the social and emotional realms. At times, the phantasmic bodies merge with lush, textural patterns or familiar domestic objects; elsewhere, their intertwining limbs dissolve, and their spectral forms collide. With restless variations of tonal contrasts, kaleidoscopic compositions, and rapturous sensory details, Baden visualizes the emotional undercurrents shaping empirical experience and the multifarious ways humans morph according to their environment.
That Baden’s creative practice includes extensive textile experimentation is evidenced by the abundance of fabric and the assiduous attention paid to representing material texture. Rendering the striated topography of a fabric hammock, the concentric ripples that form atop a swimming pool, the labyrinthine grain of hardwood flooring, and the intricate stitching on a patchwork quilt, she elevates the tactile possibilities of the canvas and engages the viewer in a dynamic kinetic experience. The overwhelming accrual of sensation and texture enacts the inescapable deluge of stimulus and information inherent to contemporary life. Material frenzy climaxes in Gaze, Embrace, & Headspace, where unfurling swaths of jewel-tone patterns and planes of geometric designs threaten to subsume the two ghostly figures.
Throughout the exhibition, skin ranges from fleshy and opaque to barely perceptible and translucent. In Hold On Through the Night and Spectral Embrace, intimate contact renders bodies luminous and ethereal as if illustrating an enmeshing not of flesh but of spirit. In Fluid Feelings, the figure’s skin and hair maintain substance and density but take on the vibrant hues of their surroundings, turning her complexion an electric cobalt and her tresses a florescent pink. The dissolution of the boundary between exterior and interior worlds not only imbues the works with an element of the sublime but dispels illusions of objective reality and fixed identity, revealing the invisible forces that color over experience and the fluidity of personhood.
The surreal diptych Mindlessly Full-Minded portrays overlapping nude bodies with detailed faces and cartoonish limbs sprawled atop an opulent floral background. While their heads rest tenderly on one another’s stomachs, their hands are poised over their respective breasts and crotches in gestures that suggest either a desire for pleasure and connection or concealment. They appear at once intimately connected and entirely alone. Portrayed in vibrant hues spanning from warm crimson to gelid indigo, the emotional freight associated with specific colors—the florid flush of passion or the gentle melancholy of violet—further compounds the ambiguity of their relations and expressions and forces the viewer to accept irresolution.
Baden’s refusal to submit to easy comprehension and categorization affords the paintings an illusory quality that destabilizes perception and engenders revelation. By infusing quotidian scenes of domesticity with an unbridled and wholly original creative vision, as with Sunset Doorway, which imagines the visage of a house affixed to the sky, and Shadow Projections & Amber Light, where a ghostly umbra hovers over a bathtub, the paintings transcend the personal and anecdotal. Plumbing the depths of the human condition, Baden explores the universal experience of living in a body amongst other bodies. –Tara Anne Dalbow
