Jennifer Seas

Referencing the experience of reading in all its iterations and rendering language into form, these drawings consider the pre-position of our subjectivity: the mother.

I have catalogued every poetry book dedicated to the author’s mother that is held in the collections of the Charleston Carnegie Public Library and the Mattoon Public Library , and from these references created an evolving series of graphite drawings. Articulated on handmade paper, the prepositional phrase related to each poet’s mother is isolated (omitting any additional details or references to other individuals), and the faint imprint of text on the verso and the shadows cast onto the page from the opened gutter and/or the book-holder’s body are also rendered.

Text from the dedication pages is used to abstract new drawings from the word “mother” and the punctuation that accompanies each prepositional phrase. Drawings of some other texts—such as one by the Ocean Memory Project—have been included in this expanding body of work that investigates our relationship to language, reading, and relationality.

Thanks to Andrea Peterson and Grace West for their contributions to this work.

Float Sink Swim is a project that conceptually connects a body’s movement through water, Roland Barthes’ theory of “readerly” and “writerly” texts, and the affects of love. Considering the passive reflectivity of floating and the “readerly” text with the active propulsion of swimming and the “writerly” text, this work proposes another qualitative relational realm in the penetrative undoing of sinking and how that might frame a “gazerly” text.

I created this suite of sculptural works to explore these ideas as part of the exhibition Staging Ground curated by Lilly McEllroy, and the exhibition closing also featured Red Tide, a durational 5-hour reading. This performed autofiction—which is one chapter in the larger Bather’s Manifesto—cites texts from Tavi Meraud, Michael Taussig, and Sylvia Plath while it playfully meanders through sources as varied as personal narrative, state boating laws, optics, animal fables, Inuit and Greek mythologies, online product reviews, and trans-Neptunian space to define the landscape as a medium of power and exchange, and to consider bodies of water as eyes of the Earth.

excerpt from Staging Ground: A Forest for Artists by Erin Dodson, Curator, Hallmark Art Collection:

“In the history of human ideas about the wilderness, it was often thought of as a terrifying place where good and evil sparred. From the story of being cast out of the Garden of Eden with an admonishment, cursed is the ground because of you, to philosophers entering the forests, seeking dangerous experiences to draw out the sublime, the staggering power of nature has always been humbling for humans. The visions of the Hudson River School painters – landscapes exaggerated and compiled for the highest drama and awe – fell in step with the priorities of the 19th century American zeitgeist: discovering new lands, claiming and taming them. This great essay by William Cronon insists that the forests and plains are not these untouched, pure places we’ve accepted from our Romantic predecessors, but that any allegedly wild place exists now only through a strict human intervention, even violence.

…Durational Thickness, is comprised of the book On Slowness, which through some process has been imbued with saltwater and lithium sulfate – forming crystals on the cover.  The book stands upright, jacketless, in a dusty blue cover, and the pages sag forward with their own weight, parting at page 117 – a chapter titled “Dream | Time Cinema”. Next on the wall is Baker’s Long View; a photograph of a figure wearing an orange life jacket, reading a book, floats in the center of the frame, surrounded by a blue lake under a blue sky with white fluffy clouds.  

I feel I am meant to see the book and the photograph as being related, as if the floating, reading figure is performing part of the process that leaves the book in its final state. “Durational thickness” is a ponderous phrase, describing something that exists in time, with a beginning and end, but also exists in space, with a measurable physicality and limits… perhaps like a human life or a book. There are references to therapeutic ideas – the title On Slowness brings to mind a posture of mindfulness, though after I downloaded author Lutz Koepnick’s introduction to my Kindle (the opposite of slowness), I see that the book outlines a framework for contemporary art that embraces deliberate aesthetic slowness as a solution to the exhausted possibilities of the modern and the postmodern in art (art is the thing that needs the therapy). Lithium sulfate is the clearest reference to therapy, as its most common usage is in a drug to treat bipolar disorder, but lithium also makes me think of mineral baths sought out by bathers throughout history for their purported healing properties. 

Beyond this wall is one more set of works by Baker, a pair of ovular sinks atop pedestals, filled with water. At the bottom of the bowls are illuminated circles that reveal words – the text in This Heartbreaking Region refers to Georges Bataille’s surrealist sex romp The Story of the Eye, and The Scene which Seems to be Seen takes a line from a later book influenced by Bataille –  Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Baker’s ovular bowls may take their form from Bataille’s book – one of his characters is fixated on this eye shape, and it appears as a motif through the narrative. Are these dual lenses binoculars through which to see, or are they seeing us? Baker’s illuminated oculi seem to be watching the proceedings, their vision altered – an audience for the theater.”

installation photography by EG Schempf and others

TRACE (on washing) was born from a printmaking project in which I endeavored to make relief prints from a carved salt slab using cuttlefish ink before bathing with it, a process that both dissolved the plate and allowed my body to absorb it. The final iteration of the project resulted in a video with audio featuring an erasure poem taken from an industrial guide to the uses of salt and illustrating the auditory and tactile qualities of water by incorporating common ASMR triggers recorded within a sensory deprivation saltwater flotation tank.

On September 15, 2017 NASA’s Cassini spacecraft ended its twice-extended twenty-year mission by plunging into Saturn’s atmosphere and combusting. No One Looks After You—which opened the same day at PLUG Projects—examines how we create contemporary mythologies by considering Cassini’s historic expedition along with aquatic cephalopods, artificial intelligence, art history, psychopharmacology, and mysticism. This installation of video, sculptural works, and obsessive casts of the word “YOU” honors journeys of solitude, servitude, and sacrifice that explore surfaces and seas, space and self.

As part of the exhibition's programming, poet and contemplative artist Philip Matthews led SEA—a meditation for YOU and Cassini in the gallery, marking the twentieth anniversary of Cassini’s departure from Earth on October 15, 1997. Inspired by the conceptual anchors of Service, Empathy, and Annihilation, participants were asked to blend Cassini’s imagined perspective with their own.

“For is a dedication and an address—a prepositional link to an object that simultaneously necessitates a pulling away from what it's modifying. In this collection of uncanny sculptures, Baker constructs an accretive and corrosive world, alternately bodily and aquatic. Through the terrestrial materials of iron, glass, and wood, objects are grounded but vulnerable to the erosive effects of stasis; through the oceanic elements of salt, squid ink, and sand, these same objects are set fantastically adrift yet made perilously unmoored. Vacillating amidst these tensions, one is compelled to ask "For what?" and "For whom?" Rooted in transience—to the extent that these sculptures will continue to evolve as their materiality organically changes over time—this work proposes an open-ended discourse, wherein a viewer may revel in both the tactility of what is and the precarity of what will be.”

—Jessica Baran

"While you’re at beverly, go next door to fort gondo to see "JE Baker: FOR." Artist Jennifer Baker, who served as G-CADD’s curatorial resident during the 2015-16 season, has recently left for Kansas City; though she says she will make return visits to St. Louis, the show has a bittersweet, slightly terminal feel to it, which simply adds to its power. Baker’s work is concerned with the passage of time, and the pieces in this stark, beautiful show definitely feel like objects dredged up from a shipwreck after years of being lost. Lu points out that these pieces show a terrific mastery of both form and materials, and that the body and how it indicates sea as part of the underlying theme, as revealed by the titles: “Finless” (which alludes to the harvesting of shark fins), “Nightwater,” “Spill,” and “A Flensing Plan.” (Anyone who read Judy Blume’s Blubber in elementary school will know what flensing is, but if not, weak-stomached as this author is, I’ll send you to the Wikipedia entry.) Lu says that even the placement of the plinth, which holds “Finless,” “Of Disappearing,” “Nightwater,” “Spill,” was very deliberate in that way. "It's like the body without organs in waves of the ocean," Lu says, pointing out the different tiers. "The piece titled Finless is the piece that reminds me of this notion in myth that the seventh wave is always the tallest that makes the biggest impact. And 'FOR' with its fragmental bodies, is almost like a certain kind of assemblage, with numbers of 'things' and pieces gathered into a single context. And this assemblage can bring about any number of 'effects' for viewers—aesthetic, melancholic, productive, destructive, consumptive, devotion et ecetera.” Like the seventh wave, "FOR," is subtle, sublime, magical."

—Stefene Russell for St. Louis Magazine

“I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at the moment.”

—Paul Thek

FORMS is an exhibition about allowing things to be what they are. Discovering complicated and poignant relationships between sculptural/ritual objects, time, light, memory, and photography demonstrates how artistic processes can create new and useful forms to examine our systems of behavior and belief. This installation tells a personal story of sisterhood and reveals the shapes that grief can take as one contends with homelessness, helplessness, and hopelessness in order to find resolution and peace.

The founding myth of Rome is a tale of a she-wolf and two heroic brothers, Romulus and Remus, who fought to the death. But there is more than one way to tell a story. In an installation of paintings, sculptures and video, JE Baker uses ponderous forms and pungent materials to create a tormented memorial to the men’s mother, a vestal virgin raped by the god Mars and forced to abandon her twins at their birth. The Guilty Woman of the Forest and Her Many Tombs contains guttural sculptures of the hills of Rome and paintings of its shores, representing them as sites both real and imaginary, geographic and emotional. Everything is drenched in organic substances like molasses, crystalized salt and milk, insisting on life as much as eventual decay, and the importance of smells and natural processes in the work of feminist historical recuperation.

—Lori Waxman

2013

video projection, audio, table, bible,

milk, shellac, water, and trough

2012

Netting, handmade paper, raw milk, shellac, wood, and video

How Will This Be, JE Baker’s video and paper environment, makes formal and narrative references to a familiar figure in Western art, that of the Virgin Mary. In the Bible, when the Angel Gabriel first approaches Mary to announce that she will bear a son, Mary responds with a question: “How will this be?” By mixing the material and ephemeral, sacred and profane, animal and human, Baker evokes a similar sense of confusion mingled with awe.

Like sagging skin, an expanse of handmade paper pulls away from the gallery walls, creating a soft protrusion where we would expect to find a corner’s sharp right angle. Seemingly fragile, the wrinkled, drooping paper bears traces of a kind of traumatic history: embedded grit, bilious orange and pink stains, fibrous clots, and the faint stamp, in rust, of a storm drain grate. Over this already irregular surface, a coating of raw milk and shellac forms a kind of second skin, a curdled, cracked crust with a lingering, sour scent. The seductively tactile nature of the paper operates in tension with the discomfiting intimation, both visual and olfactory, of a body on the brink of collapse. 

A tall, narrow box sits just a few feet away from the wall, almost nestled in the swell of paper. Reminiscent of both a baptismal fount or a pedestal without a sculpture, it beckons us to investigate, to approach and look down, and we unconsciously adopt a slumped posture that echoes the sagging wall. A video plays on a screen set down a couple inches into the pedestal, an image of dark sloshing water in a galvanized steel basin, swirling around the partially submerged body of a dead fawn. As the movement subsides, the indistinct reflection of a woman—soft, wavy hair tumbling around her shoulders—emerges.

The scene changes. and now we watch over the woman’s shoulder as she gently bathes the fawn, cupping its head in one hand and running her other hand over its frail torso. She is clad in blue, the brilliant hue of lapis lazuli, traditionally used in Catholic art to denote the Virgin. Soon, the washing becomes a kind of baptism as she scoops handfuls of water and sprinkles them on the deer’s head. As she lifts the fawn from the water, its body collapses limply and water drips, like tears, from its slender nose and delicate legs. Finally, purposefully, the woman carries the fawn to a strange nest of sorts, a cavity crafted from seemingly the same paper that hangs on the wall. She places it carefully amidst the folds, curled into itself, as if it has returned to its mother’s belly.

Comparisons to the Pietà, the Virgin Mother cradling her dead son in her arms, are inescapable. Yet that icon of maternal languish takes on a new resonance here as the dead son is replaced with a wild creature and the tomb is transformed into an open womb. Baker calls upon her viewers to bear witness to sorrow, to take on a ritual of mourning as their own, and, in doing so, to contemplate how such brushes with death can shape the way we live.

—Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt

in collaboration with Natalie Baldeon

2011

video and sound