Melanie Baker
Baker works in charcoal for the power of the blackness; the deep, endless space it can represent. It is the void that will suck you in, without any indication of what awaits. Her work is based on media images of power; people who wield control over others. She attempts to investigate their surfaces, the skin on their faces and hands, the texture of the serious pinstriped suits, the microphones, the papers, the brass-studded leather chairs. She eliminates as much information as possible, to focus on the extraordinary power that’s conferred upon certain men, and objects and symbols imbued with a precious sacredness that shores up their right to maintain their position. It is a study that’s both political and personal, for they are another species to her, one that attracts and repels: it’s a desire to get beneath the skin of something to which she has no access. It’s this skin that interests her: what it covers up and what it reveals.
Part of her impetus to make art lies in her direct, tactile contact with the drawing itself. She cannot be removed from it. The only way to make the paper as black as she needs it to be is to rub it with the palms of her hands. Her hands are callused; sometimes they bleed from all the rubbing. They are her connection to the work- the thing we share, what we have in common. The drawings need her skin.
Baker's recent drawings were focused solely on American government officials, cropped portraits of the president and his cabinet. She collaged newspaper articles to form their faces and hands, articles about their words and actions, as if they were made of whatever the media tells us about them. She cropped these images, rearranged and deleted parts of the content, and blew them up to an overwhelming scale. Currently she is focusing less on the American political landscape, and concentrating on other visual manifestations of power.
The aesthetic aspect of art is, for her, the emotional hook, which seduces the viewer, draws them in and makes them want to stay. One might be uncomfortable, but the power of the work relies on this ability to insist the viewer keep looking. That power is often elusive and difficult to define, just as is the seductive power of the political and the personal. She believes visual art must retain something inexplicable to sustain itself, an ambivalence, a teetering imbalance between attraction and revulsion, a dip in the muddy waters to look for treasure.