Alabama Reckoner
April 20 - June 30, 2018
Alabama Reckoner is an exploration of the process-driven work of Alabama artist, Douglas Pierre Baulos. In this exhibition, he will present portraits of artists that inspire him, many of whom are also from Alabama. The portraits consist of three dimensional found objects, handmade paper, and meticulous details that give clues to each of the artists’ personalities.
Of his work, Baulos says, “These portrait installations reflect a multitude of interests including grief and mortality, nesting and mending, memory, the physical body, and spirituality. Although I work with emotionally heavy, conceptual themes like loss, mortality, and the power and delicate nature of memory, my work is a reflection of my attempt to live my life in fragile exultation. The process of piecing together an image is a meditative exercise for me, having as much to do with duration as physical texture or of following the thread of mindfulness to create installations that concretize ephemeral and intangible theories of information and time. I merge the abstraction of narrative with the physicality of objects.
In the portraits I’m pinpointing intangible experiences and feelings and creating diorama maps where the sentient, intimate and vestigial are articulated, placing the viewer in their midst. The figurative/vestigial re-telling nature of some of my work stresses the idea of transformation and recovery over victimization. There is an intimacy with the subject becoming object, with the reverence for the past life and the confrontation of the doggedly present body. I’m interested in forms and images that accompany the body and in the traces the body leaves: a bed, a nest, a web, decay and shadows. My work is about exploring where these spaces are suspended for observation and meet at a crossroads between the temporal (fleeting) and concrete (lasting).”
This is the second exhibition in a three-part series recognizing Alabama’s Bicentennial and highlights the 2018 bicentennial theme “Honoring our People.”
THURSDAY, JUNE 7, 6 p.m.
Artist Talk with Doug Baulos – “Mending, Memory and Placemaking”