Wither and Bloom
Jordan Nobuko Baker Paintings
Xan Peters Sculptures
Opening Reception
Saturday, Nov. 30, 4-6pm
D’Arcy Simpson Gallery
409 Warren Street
Hudson, NY
| Two artists reach into history to express the vulnerabilities of life and truth in a modern age. Employing the techniques of the classical Dutch Baroque Vanitas paintings, Baker creates still-life work of flowers, fruit, vegetables and skulls that explore themes of death, transience and renewal. Her subjects symbolize aging, sickness and decay–the fleetingness of life. They are reverently and sumptuously painted in lush, vibrant colors-their beauty ignorant of their impermanence. The Dutch Vanitas paintings emerged in 17th century Europe at the beginning of free-market capitalism. They sought to caution the worship of wealth over morality and remind the viewer of the certainty of death and futility of material pursuit. Today, Baker reintroduces us to these allegorical paintings in a very different time of human history. The Baroque themes are enduring, yet the paintings take on an additional meaning in a time where truth, values and liberty are also fleeting and impermanent-and just as fragile and vulnerable as the physical body. There is a new relevance to these paintings, marked by late stage capitalism -a social experiment in its old age, its best years gone- as if we are living in its last gasp. Xan Peters also uses the skull as a symbol of lost corporeality and truth. He sculpts fine white porcelain to create skulls of extinct animals. They are smooth, almost translucent, and etched withthe stories of the species’ lives when they walked on Earth. These etchings, a kind of hieroglyphics ofthe artist’s creation, remind us that these animals had profound and distinct existences that have been forgotten or mythologized. These works serve as a voice for the voiceless, and as an insistence that we acknowledge our own powerlessness to tell our stories after we are gone. |