Debra Baxter is not interested in her early work, which features clouds. She posts no images on her Web site. Neither Howard House nor Massimo Audiello, the galleries that represent her, allude to it in any way.
(Baxter’s current show here. My review here.)
In the interests of getting me to leave her alone, however, she sent me a few images from her old world, created late in the 1990s into the mid-2000s.
The first I saw were made of powder puffs sewn together. They loomed with lumpy grace out from the wall, obviously clouds and something else too, carriers of an antique feminine code – the gangster’s moll who powders her nose as men plot murder.
Powder puffs beautify their owners while being themselves quickly
stained and discarded, just as despoilers of the land, made rich, move
on.
Quickly following were another series of larger, more imposing
powder-puff clouds, caught in the act of transforming themselves into
something more substantial, maybe the white cliffs of Dover.
When they mutated again, they had taken on an ominous cast, spreading
along a ceiling and down the seam of a wall like a fungus, a powdery
decay.
At the end, she was back to beauty in a big way. A single cloud hung
from floor to ceiling in the Platform Gallery. Made of silk tissue
paper, it billowed with a dainty grace in spite of its bulk.
An exhibit
at Gallery 4Culture titled, The Cloud That Fell to Earth, was a tribute to Walter Tevis’ 1960s novel about a man who fell to Earth, too alien, tender and talented to thrive here.
The massive cloud made of cotton and felt clung to the ceiling as if it
feared falling. Wrapping itself around the gallery’s industrial air
ducts, its intensity was spineless. This pendulous portent, this baggy
monster, wanted to retreat and had nowhere to go.
In Spent, her cloud is a loogie hawked out of the sky to land with a muffling
thud on a pine tree. In the photo that pretends to document sky’s
insult to land, the pine tops a mountain, with white air surrounding
the tree as a kind of reverberation.
In a series of small photos collectively
titled Portable Weather System, a cloud tries its luck in a
variety of settings and yet remains a stranger. It’s
strange on a lonely road, strange at the ocean and strange indoors.
Apparently, loony clouds can lose their place in the natural order.
Me and My Cloud portrays Baxter as a nurse taking her
ailing air mass for a walk.
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