Take a moment to think about how you experience time. How time thrums when you’re in the car; how it modulates within and around a phone screen; how it rests, firmly, on your shoulders, when you’re experiencing something that feels significant. Time, its lithe movements and its sluggish pauses, plays a central role in the experience of Amanda Baldwin’s work. This month, the artist will make her UK debut: Wild Weeds at London’s Public Gallery, on display until December 15th.
Flat, rhythmic, mathematical, Wild Weeds’ nine new paintings indulge a hyperbolic, disjointed sense of reality. Baldwin toys with vivid colors to hyperbolize the natural world– underscored by artistic traditions like landscape paintings on Chinese porcelain and Lichtenstein-esque pop art, Wild Weeds reinforces the temporal realities introduced by classical art and installs them into new, dislocated landscapes. Works like Cerulean Monsoon (2023) ripple traditional understandings of gravity, tugging at the invisible cord between the viewer and the canvas. Subverting traditional understandings of the natural world while still leaving traces of the familiar just perceptible enough for audiences to invite themselves into a world of Baldwin’s own design, Wild Weeds sits comfortably in the eerie.
Based in Queens, Amanda Baldwin’s work with pattern, rhythm, and still life explores the imminent pressures of climate change, the relentless rhythms of modern life, and the anxieties of the digital realm.
