Current Exhibition
Exhibition Dates: April 13 - May 5, 2024
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 13, 6-9 pm
Gallery hours are Saturdays and Sundays, 12-5 pm, except for Second Saturdays when hours are 6-9 pm.
Chard, ink on paper, 21”x23”, 2023
Yucky Scenarios depicts imagined moments within the lifespan of a work of art. Born from asking myself: “How does a work of art come to be?” and, “Where does art go when it dies?” I sought to stage and act out these scenarios by constructing three-dimensional models— like dioramas—to be photographed, digitally altered, and transformed into stipple drawings. This notion of explaining art to myself quickly evolved into making art for art, art for me, art about me, art about me and art, and so on…
I started to look at commercials. In particular, ones produced by movie theater companies to be showcased alongside main attractions. These brief adverts parade the typical accoutrements of the theatrical movie-viewing experience— popcorn, soda, film projectors, jazz instruments— coming to life and traversing the space between the audience and image. I used this type of self-referential display to inform and develop my own story about a work of art.
Stippling has its own affiliations with fantasy and gaudy realism. It’s a lowbrow enterprise— the stuff of Fantasia, MC Escher, Alice in Wonderland, high school notebooks and Zap Comics. If surrealism is its friend, Post-minimalism is its foe. Stipple drawings reveal within them an atomic sense of order— a fluid yet divisible form of matter characterized by clusters of dots. Objects appear vibrantly uncertain, as if undergoing a constant physical transformation. It’s a useful tool for illustrating the things we cannot see. In this work, blobs, ogres, explosions, theatre props, and checkered floors re-imagine the artist’s domain as a site for comedy and redemption. It’s a question concerning the stuff of art and its meaning in our lives.
Anthony Baab is an artist and Senior Professor of Practice at Tulane University who studied Painting and Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute (’04) before obtaining an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Cornell University (‘09). His work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Grand Arts, Haw Contemporary, Antenna Works, and Three Walls and has been included in several permanent collections including: The Nelson Atkins Museum, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum, and The Microsoft Collection. Residencies include: Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Joan Mitchell Residency Program. Baab’s work was recently included in the book: Problems and Provocations (Grand Arts). He has an upcoming solo exhibition at Op cit in Mexico City in summer 2025.
Connections: Staple Goods 10th Anniversary Exhibition Catalog
Exhibition catalog commemorates the collective’s 10th anniversary exhibition, Connections (May 2021), and is available for $5.
Text by Amy Mackie. Book Design by Tiffany Lin. Printed at Paper Machine. Curated by Laura Richens.
Participating Artists: Minka/Thomasine, Aaron Collier, Robyn Denny, William DePauw, Abe Geasland, Daniel Kelly IV, Kristina Knipe, J Knoblach, Norah Lovell, Kaori Maeyama, Anne Nelson, Jack Niven, Laura Richens, Cynthia Scott, Sadie Sheldon, Lorna Williams