Book Review: Carrie Ann Baade and the Jabberwockies

Carrie Ann Baade, Scissors and Tears, by Anna Wall, Susan L. Aberth, Carrie Anne Baade, and Selena Chambers. La Luz de Jesus Press

Carrie Ann Baade’s paintings are extraordinary images built of chaotic fragments which somehow hold together in coherence against the tangle and tumble of disorder that seems to rush from them into the reality on this side of the frame. The rigid proscenium that normally distances viewers from the disturbing imagery of the stage seems frayed by Baade’s art, as slices of id and ego and the reflected self are punctuated by snips and clips from art history. Weeping saints, and Balinese demons, and inverted buildings jumble together and continually surprise readers flipping the pages of the beautifully bound book, which is a sensual pleasure.

Carrie Ann Baade, The Plague. An Allegory about Dating in Tallahassee, 2008, 20" x 16"

The Eyes of God and the Jabberwocky

The front board of her book Scissors and Tears is cleverly finished with the thick gloss and lamination of a cropped medieval eye chopped from a book of churchy panels complete with rectangular crop and edge framing the weeping, and standing proudly above a butterfly, moths and wings of an emblematic composition of a deconstructed Madonna repeated on the back. Inside there are hieroglyphic amalgams of the flipped royals of playing cards, and peacock feathers, and the sanctified nimbuses and feathered wings of holy saints and angels, raptor beaked birds, lacrimatas, and many of the inquisitive eyes of God all-seeing and examining the open and akimbo limbs of a pornographic model spread for the attention of a hummingbird’s tongue and a giant be-jeweled dildo rising from the crotch. Haunted and flame-headed Baade rises from sleep, lifting herself from her own macabre dreams of her doubled death. She is an iconic society-gloved Mary under a cosmic halo, gathering butterfly wings to her fiery breast. She kisses a chimera, beheaded and rebuilt as a hybrid of paper and paint.

Carrie Ann Baade, Scissors and Tears cover

Insanity and Surrealism

She is not quite a surrealist. The whirling psychoses which pushed Leonora Carrington from her polite British family into a Spanish mental hospital, then sanctuary in mad Mexico, and pulled Antonin Artaud away from the hallucinating Tarahumara of the North Mexican desert into a fearful French asylum, are unlikely to suck her sideways into spiraling madness from her haven as an art professor at the University of Florida, for her role does not spring from the fountains of madness, and though her clever creativity may resemble surrealism, in fact it is a reinvention of it, an enactment of it – and when she opens her exhibits, her audience finds her performing, costumed in dramatic assemblages of clothed anachronism. She is an ironic actor. She is a player enjoying her role with the exquisite command of a first-class thespian. She is the Bellatrix Lestrange of painting, concealing herself behind the masks of masquerade, peeking out behind others’ eyes. A cheerful agent of chaos, she is Lewis Carrol’s hunter in Jabberwocky, the famous poem crafted from invented words struck together like the flint and steel of fantasy and form, throwing flinty sparks into the kindling of imagination.

Carrie Ann Baade opening performance

The book begins with a mercifully brief and disappointing slew of art-speak cliché filling two pages by curator Anna Wall. Didactic Wall misses the open invitation of opportunity offered by the book to treat her subject with the same invention that Baade treats imagery, instead delivering her clogged introduction as a clumsy slosh of imitation and convention, written with little grace and no panache. Readers can easily skip these uninteresting pages to enjoy Baade’s brilliant imagery.

Carrie Ann Baade, Collage for Allegory of Bad Government, 2012

Yes, these paintings are the result of Baade’s intention, “to write my name on the body of work mostly made by men,” but she is bigger than the dull bores and tropes of academic feminism. Fortunately, Susan L. Alberth’s excellent essay is wildly better than Wall’s introduction to Baade’s work, with complex perceptions of the artist as “mercurial and sexy,” and the paintings as “the hybrid children of the museum and punk rock.” Alberth describes Baade’s unusual working method as well, and punctuates her excellent prose with Baade’s collages, which are fascinating insights into the creative process of making the paintings, provoking much flipping back and forth between the collages and pictures of the paintings which appear later in the book.

Carrie Ann Baade, Allegory of Bad Government, 2018, oil on canvas, 36 x 48

Punk Collage

Baade’s process begins by slicing through scattered photographs, cut from coffee table picture books and scattered on the studio floor, the workspace where she emulates her surrealist predecessors by searching for unusual juxtapositions of imagery that speak the languages of subconscious interpretation, revealing messages from the emergent mind like a tarot card reader. Her assemblages reveal her preoccupations with women’s roles – the tea-sipping bourgeoisie, the fashion models, the weeping saints and a spread-legged whore are spliced together into uncanny collages as new creations, and these are feminist preoccupations, to be sure, but the paintings don’t fully embrace the tropes – men are not her “manxome” foe and Baade is comfortable with sexuality, and sometimes openly and unironically erotic. Love is hard. Love is risky. Love is imperfect. But there’s no hint here that it should be forsaken.

Carrie Ann Baade, The Involuntary Thoughts of Lady Caroline Dubois, 2004, Oil on Panel, 24" x 18"

Respect for Technique

Baade’s own essay reveals herself as a Dr. Frankenstein, ripping and rewrapping images she had revered and collected. She is self-conscious in her mission as an explorer, not a problem solver, writing, “If I truly solved or understood completely anything about what I was doing, I would likely quit doing it.” She describes her emergence as an artist during the apocalyptic end of the twentieth century, when technique was almost lost to the Western academy, and peculiar art historians preferred the perils of prognostication to respect for the past.

Carrie Ann Baade, Collage for the Involuntary Thoughts of Lady Caroline Dubois

The enigmatic snip and snap of Baade’s surreal juxtaposition doesn’t produce visual babble, for the collage of cuts is a liberation from the “uffish” thoughts of art history, which is the chimerical Jabberwock – an intimidating monster of nonsense and eyes of flame, whiffling through the tulgey woods of institutional art, burbling as it came in a babbling flow of untruths and errors. Baade’s vorpal blade snicker-snacks, and her images emerge from the sherds of her sharp work. She insists on her inclusion into the history of art, spinning her images from the gyre and gimble of “slithy toves”, and the borogoves. The paintings are self-portraits. They describe her search – all women’s search – for self-hood within the uncommon and peculiar era of postmodernity. Yes, punk disassembly and art history eat each other in an exciting struggle for supremacy in these paintings, but it is bright Baade’s insistent creativity that dominates as the theme of her work. Excellent.

’Twas brillig, Baade. You have slain the Jabberwock! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

For more on auctions, exhibitions, and current trends, visit our Magazine Page