Jennifer Barrett / Cindy Baker
JENNIFER BARRETT – WEREBEARS AND ONLY CHILDREN
CINDY BAKER – PERSONAL APPEARANCE
JAN. 9 – FEB. 20
Werebears and Only Children is a multi-media installation including painting, sculpture and video projection, based on a comic strip. The paintings are to scale and at viewing height to the 4 foot tall sculptural characters of the comic strip, complete with speech bubbles where video dialogue ensues. Thus, the characters end up critiquing themselves.
Read the exhibition essay by Craig Francis Power.
In Personal Appearance, Cindy Baker makes personal appearances as Cindy Baker in a professional mascot costume of herself. This is a project about performing oneself; the performance of expectations based on one’s own persona.
Read the exhibition essay by Allyson Mitchell.
About the artists:
Jennifer Barrett is a painter and a printmaker and member of the Board of Directors of St. Michael’s Printshop. She currently works as a commercial screen printer. Her work revolves around the extrapolation of blind contour drawings and the modification of autobiographical comics. She is a big fan of non-traditional comic artists, many of whom deal with personal stories that are often funny, tragic, and simply mundane. Currently she is creating work that brings her comic characters off the printed page and computer screen and into a three-dimensional setting.
Despite a formal education in painting and printmaking at the University of Alberta, interdisciplinary and performance artist Cindy Baker considers her non-formal training and research in gender culture, queer theory, fat activism and art theory to be as important in her development as a contemporary artist. Working with whatever materials are needed to allow her to concentrate on the theoretical, conceptual and ephemeral aspects of her work, she considers context her primary medium. Having worked and volunteered for several artist-run centres and cultural organizations in Western Canada, Cindy has a particular professional interest in the function of artist-run centres as a breeding ground of deviation.
