25. Jul - 15. Aug 2024
With works by Mack Baker
Opening July 25th with music by Kater Unser & Steini.
Mack Baker (born in Boston, MA living and working in Chicago, IL) is a transdisciplinary artist interested in the tactile allure of squishy forms—bodies, expressive line-work, and the supple undulations of clay. Spanning drawing, fibers, ceramics, and photography, Baker’s installation-based practice delves deep into themes of bodily intimacy and connection through recurring forms. Their ceramic creations explore the poignant beauty in the clay body’s decay and collapse, serving as metaphors for the serene vulnerability of the queer form. As a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, they have shown at many places in the city including Heaven Gallery, The Martin Gallery, and Izora Contemporary. Baker’s work was also included in the Austrian American Foundation’s collection in Salzburg, when they received the Seebacher award to take part in a residency at the International Summer Academie in 2022. In the last year they have completed residencies at the Institut für Alles Mögliche in Berlin and the Project Network residency at Guldagergård’s International Ceramic Research Center in Skælskør, Denmark.
My work in clay is about stacks. I am drawn to working in stacks because they feel like a collection of things, an archive of movements. They remind me of bodies that I love, both my own, my friends, and my lover’s bodies are full of the shapes which my work is formed from. The way I write then informs the way that I create (right now I am interested in the parenthetical as an interior space, a more intimate moment to say more than what is offered by the formality of an artist statement, imagine me pulling you aside, bringing you closer).
The thrown vessel is an interior space, one which fluctuates between functional and not. As a maker, I control the ways in which my forms bend and break, at which point I can push the medium to its limit. These stacks are moments of stress, collapse, vulnerability, and release. They are soft and restless all at once (I can’t help but be vulnerable in this way but fall apart and collapse, asking others to “say more about that, it is important to me” I rub and push and force to make real because otherwise I am adrift not sure which end is up, and in those moments, failure is the only thing I can rely on, knowing that more often than not, things fall apart, and when they do, it will be my hands which hold them).
More than anything, my work operates to elicit a feeling of vulnerability. When you see someone breaking down in public, holding back tears at the dinner table, a moment of emotion overflowing. An experience which is human, exhibited through the undulating motions of thrown clay: strength in fragility, failure in technique. (When I look at my stacks, I am reminded of how I feel in these moments; the relief I have when I lean on someone I love during a heartbreak, the feeling I get looking at a lover when they take off their clothes, or the simply the softness of being understood). This work is a quiet release, it is an exhalation.
The show is comprised of a body of work Mack Bakerbfinished during her residency at Claytopia.