2014 Coverer
Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT
Joell Baxter Coverer 2014 Screenprinted and woven paper, push pins 6 x 25 x 25 feet (overall) Real Art Ways, Hartford CT April 10th - June 27th, 2014
Excerpt from catalog essay by Erica Ehrenberg:
With Coverer, the gallery space is at once the room in all of its physical reality of volume, length, and height, and the psychic experience of that space made visible. It is another possible room we are both in and not in, that is at a slight angle to this one. It is a model of a galaxy lying on its back at our feet. It is the flux in temperature on a ground where light rays fall. It is the molecules of which the air is made, made tangible, like a tincture, or the thousands of possible rooms that materialize as the viewer moves through it, as Coverer stretches itself over and against the surface like a growing moss or a pixilated plane or blueprint from an alternate reality.
By painstakingly weaving together printed paper color strips of the primary colors along the spectrum, Baxter makes the white cube of the gallery space seem to move even as it stays in place— as space around us moves, or as the surface of water moves when illuminated with light.
Baxter’s work combines printmaking, painting and sculpture, another kind of liminality that makes it possible to feel as though we are inhabiting, or walking through, a painting. By printing blocks of color, cutting them by hand into 9-inch strips, and taping them together, Baxter generates a basic building block from which her forms will form, one that puts to use one of the oldest human crafts: weaving. Like strands of DNA or computer code, the permutations are what allow this malleable building block to grow into worlds, both real and imagined. The over under stitch gives the paper strips a physical strength and integrity—the resulting “fabric” is strong enough to be moved from place to place, or to re-arrange itself in different forms. The piece could be a raft, a tent, a blanket—something that can be folded down or expanded—it is the beginning of architecture, of clothing, the possibility of portable warmth and shelter that liberates a nomadic tribe.