Atlanta Homes and Lifestyles, “Home for the Holidays Showhouse,” Annual Interior Designer Showhouse, 2021.
Interior Designer: Bowdre Longo. Photographer: Emily Followill.
Cullum, Jerry. “Review: ‘Out of the Ordinary’ at Spalding Nix Fine Art is beautiful and unsettling.” ARTSATL. August 25, 2021. (Excerpt)
The only artist in the show who isn’t Atlanta based, Hudson Valley artist Jordan Baker, contributes tightly formal still lifes in which, one way or another, something seems out of sync with what convention dictates for contemporary forms of this conservative genre.
In the main series of work, varieties of fruit are arranged meticulously on crumpled, striped bedsheets. The simple unlikelihood of encountering, say, a combination of sliced and whole blood oranges in such a setting is rendered even more disturbing by the fact that most of the fruit is bruised.
It is as though the real world of the supermarket had intruded on the idealized world of still-life painting, alongside the deformed retention of idealism expressed by the meticulously rendered untidy backdrops for occasionally classical compositions of objects. Other works’ portrayals of messy multiplicities of fruit, seen against a more traditional black velvet drape, only intensifies the sense of disconnect.
Baker systematically deploys an extraordinary command of technique in exploring her subversive subject matter, and her work of creative destruction is capped off with the inclusion of a single work of sculpture: a splendidly textured bronze roasted chicken, titled “I Roasted You a Chicken.”
