Carrie Ann Baade-The Apocalyptic Orgasm

Exhibition: May 4-May 27
Reception: Fri. May 4, 8-11 PM

La Luz de Jesus Gallery is pleased to present “Apocalyptic Orgasm” by artist Carrie Ann Baade. This marks the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery. Revelations inform the concepts behind this new work. The apocalypse represents the time after the present one – not a literal end of the world, but a release after the climax from the tension and accumulation of religion- and gender-based dynamics, which prevail in the current paradigm. These paintings seek the unveiling of the divine or supernatural disclosure of human existence as they investigate the role of the female body in Western culture and the implications this has on women’s experience. While some imagine the monstrous, abject female recovering her power from the patriarchy, others re-envision god as a woman, femininity is feared, has been abjected historically, and continues being so in our contemporary society. By remixing the historical, mythic narratives, these paintings employ the grotesque and the uncanny to ponder upon the patriarchal and phallocentric ideology.

The artist describes her work “I paint linking the power of historical masterworks with my own experience as a contemporary artist. By using this fragmentary “boneyard” of painting with reverence, I am a scavenger salvaging lost aesthetics. My art has been an attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable, resulting in exploitation of fragmentation found in collage; I think of myself as a kind of Dr. Frankenstein attempting to piece together the sublime. These painted parables comprised of remnants of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, create surreal landscapes inhabited by exotic figures. As the steward and axman, I return to the haunting moments in art history to reclaim them, not merely as a quotation of a theme or an image, but to recapture the materiality of methods and techniques in which they were created. The material strategies necessary to deploy these paintings bring a contemporary voice to the past while contemplating the ageless issues of morality, politics, and the individual quest for self-expression.”

Carrie Ann Baade (born 1974 in Louisiana) is a contemporary painter whose work quotes from, interacts with, and deeply relates to art history. She paints in dialogue with relevant masterpieces from Modern period to antiquity, to reclaim them in a surreal narrative that is simultaneously biographical. Carrie Ann Baade received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, studied at the Florence Academy of Art in Italy, and earned her MFA in Painting from the University of Delaware. Raised on the front range in Colorado, she now lives and works in Tallahassee, where she is an Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at Florida State University.

Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions: the Delaware Contemporary, Billy Shire Fine Arts in Los Angeles, the Ningbo Art Museum in China, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida.

Contact gallery director Matthew Gardocki for purchase info:
info@laluzdejesus.com (323)666-7667