Katie Baker

Winner – Editor’s Spotlight Award in Art

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Sighting

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Behind the Bed

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Higher Than I Could Reach

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Who’s Afraid of the Dark?

– Caressa Layne on the Work of Katie Baker

To draw from memory is its own kind of myth-making. To create a visual representation of the experience is to resist the pressure of the here-and-now and draw from someplace else. Memory is not history. It lingers within us. Katie Baker’s drawings captures not only the nostalgia of childhood bedtime, but the mute dread and expectation of the dark. Far from overt wistfulness, her drawings subject the viewer to a reminiscence of the pulse-bumping fear of jump-to-the-bed-before-it-gets-you. However, it makes no difference what it is. Allowing the setting to immerse the viewer in the raw emotionality, Baker offers no object of fear.

It is noteworthy that Baker’s subject matter in these three drawings have been completed with colored pencil on paper. The nostalgia presents itself not only through the cool tones of the nocturns, but through the very materiality of each piece. In Sighting, Baker represents a familiar scene: that morning’s mug sitting atop a vanity, in casual disarray. Yet by casting subtle and dramatic light diffusion from the frond, the viewer is immersed into the delicately sinister play of shadows. We ask: just what is the light source? Do we really want to know? Again, in Higher than I Could Reach, Baker’s masterful contrast of dark and shadow is pushed further. From the perspective of the viewer, the shadows reach as we look on, threatening to overwhelm and surround.

Perhaps most evocative of soft and surrounding fright is Baker’s Behind the Bed. Carefully toeing the line between a true representation and surrealism, the figure (or fragments of) juts out at odd angles, implying that the monstrous could very well be found in the very thing the viewer is intended to relate to. Capturing the anxiety of plunging a limb into the familiar unknown in the deep parts of the night, Baker does not stop there. In a clever play, Baker distorts the very protagonist of the work. From the cool tones of the majority of the work, interrupted only by the masterfully sculpted anatomy of toes and fingers separates the figure from the setting: but not entirely. The electric jolt of neon in the foreground suggests a time and place other than what we know. Yet the entire work is evocative of a feeling so universal that it is impossible to ignore the memories that resurface of our own instinctual childhood fears that we never truly outgrow.

Existing in the center of that delicate tug between dreamy nostalgia and voiceless dread, Katie Baker’s works invite us to consider the places we take for granted. To admit and accept that not everything is rational and even grown-ups can be afraid of the dark.

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