Debra Baxter – panic attacks

(Note: Mistaking it for a multiple, I deleted the first version of this review after posting it, which is a good trick. Now for my second trick: recreating the piece from memory, or what’s left of it.)

Art consists in going the full length. If you start with drums you have to end with dynamite, or TNT.
– Ravel, quoted in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.

Debra Baxter began with clouds. She tracked the drift of distant fairy palaces even as they fell splat onto a tree, like a gob of spit hawked from the throat of a hostile sky.

If the sky was going to spit on her, she might as well return to her studio, which she did, ending career as a landscape artist.

The objects she makes now bear a direct relationship to her body. (At Howard House through June 24.)

Suck it Up (carved alabaster and quartz crystal) 2009

Jeff Koons began in similar territory in 1985, with Aqualung.

His is a generalized emblem of failure. Hers is intimate. One need not be in trouble to put on a life vest, but to blow into a paper bag requires a panic attack.

Baxter’s sculptures are the dead end of romance. If jukeboxes played visual art, Baxter could turn Jerry Lee Lewis inside out: You broke my will, what a thrill.

You Turn Me Inside Out Like a Glove. carved alabaster, 2008

The lavish praise parents heap on their grown children cuts the heart, as it betrays an anxiety the child might otherwise not know the parent feels for her future.

So Proud of You, 2007

The partner who asks for a time out has all the power.

Time Out. Glass, sand, sterling silver, African wonder stone, 2009

You can say anything to a loved one. The open channel of heart-to-heart communication seals the deal. Right? What could go wrong?

Speed Bag (Love Tap) 2007

The artist paring down for purity might, depending on her materials, release slivers that burrow into her lungs, making the process of making art a fatal attraction.

Dust Mask (Catching My Breath) alabaster, sterling silver 2009

There is nothing wrong with this exhibit save for the exhibit itself. Heidi Hinrichs, the great master of the material forlorn, is in the front gallery, Baxter in the back. To counter the spell Hinrichs casts, the second artist has to engage the work by batting the ball back or be so completely different than comparisions don’t occur.

Baxter can’t take either route, and she isn’t helped by the long brown ugly table on which her sculptures appear, as it makes her work look puny. Outside the context of the Howard House show, however, she’s golden.