Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / It would be hard to miss the overarching theme of Lydia Baker’s show “Sonnet,” up at Massey Klein Gallery: metamorphosis. But rather than relying on overused signifiers, she gently guides us through life’s whitewater rapids, her work practically whispering “the only constant is change.” The paintings and drawings resist a linear narrative but plainly embody a story. Her world is ethereal, physics and biology unsettled within it. The protagonists are gloopy, like heavy gas trapped in a plasmodic figure, depicted in vibrating splotches of layered color. Baker is a color and tone expert; nothing is out of place, and everything is on purpose. Paint is applied carefully and dryly to render watery paintings like Daughters and Cells Flying Side by Side and A Pool of Our Hopes and Dreams, creating an interesting tension between material and content.
In Bird’s Nest Inside a Flower, delicate creatures tenuously protected wait out rain. The picture is muted, the only real light coming from four orbs sitting just above the center of the rectangle. They are like shark eggs, just translucent enough to suggest what’s going on. They are piled on top of one another and sit in a fetal position, kept safe within a careful arm. Silhouettes of figures repose at varying levels of comfort. One lies supine, another swoops, and an unlucky pair shares a small space nestled in the armpit of the green figure. Around the figures in the orbs, the iron oxide wash used to prime the canvas is visible. They evoke cave paintings, the egg-like sacs embryos, creating a sort of double metaphor for the earliest stages of life and art. The green figure’s eyes are blueish slits, not quite open or closed, suggesting the threshold of unconsciousness. They sit within a lavender and pink pod, the titular flower. Outside it, another barely conscious figure floats in the rain. This outside figure is transparent, in contrast with the opaque green figure. The rain, like the embryos, brings to mind childhood. Touch occurs only incidentally, within the cramped confines of one orb. The scene is one of intimacy interrupted.
Elsewhere, boundaries are more porous. Forming a Window for Previous Selves and Shaping a Path Forward are adjacent and, as their titles suggest, roughly mirror each other. In both compositions, two figures bridge over each other in the foreground, leaving only a small portal in the center through which a scene plays out. In the first painting, a figure whose body is more night sky than flesh-and-blood bends over an earth-toned and more solidly grounded figure. Light emanates from under the latter’s midsection, illuminating a set of smaller light blue figures that are moving towards it, suggesting personhood in stages and perhaps gravity that these figures cannot resist. In Shaping a Path Forward, two figures lean on each other to form a window on small figures that appear to have been reconstituted from the first painting. But this painting is dark, practically monochrome. Instead of desperately letting go, the small figures exude curiosity and confidence, holding hands and looking at one another.
This pair of paintings is at once triumphant and tragic. The first accurately and poignantly describes how it feels to look back in retrospect, what it’s like to hold space for who one used to be, and what it feels like to watch a person change. The second, by contrast, describes the excitement of moving forward. Baker suggests a forelife and an afterlife while denying any real boundary between the two. Overall, “Sonnet” can be construed as a pooling of consciousness in which what came before and after congeals. If not explicitly otherworldly, the work points to somewhere separate and intimate where we can be safe. Left up to you are what exactly “safe” is and who “we” are.
“Lydia Baker: Sonnet,” Massey Klein Gallery, 124 Forsyth Street, New York, NY. Through December 7, 2024.
About the author: Jacob Patrick Brooks is an artist and writer from Kansas living in New York.
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