Alana Frances Baer
About
Viewing room
+
Reading room
Alana Frances Baer
Wendy's Subway Writing Night

POEM [one/eye] Can't Write: or To Write: A poem with the words of its own making [Alternate POEM] Blank Page Paralysis. Purity of Conception. yet/let… [I write] a word [I, for instance,] from which many flow. The POEM [1/I] concludes/continues. one-eyed POEM for/to: The End. again Cont. Write a poem with the words of its own making. [Alternate Prompt] Begin …

Wendy's Subway
Brooklyn, NY
April 10, 2025

Room for a Poem

again after again, it is already always. all this space in such a small room. all this room in such a small place. always after always, it is already again.

Unpublished

February 1, 2025

Poesis and Performance: Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly

View Full Essay
New York, NY
January 1, 2025

Review of Mark Leckey's 3 Songs from the Liver

The source material at the center of Mark Leckey’s current exhibition at Gladstone is, in his words, “some piece of shit.” This piece of shit, a clip that Leckey found on Twitter in 2021, repeats 21 times in a video that loops across two screens around 55 times per day, five days a week, for four months straight. The ostensibly banal clip features a boy …

Screen Slate
New York, NY
January 21, 2025

Exhibition Text for Cynthia Talmadge's Chevy Chase Syndrome

A wife has taken over her diplomat-husband’s office in the US embassy in New Delhi, recasting the cartography of diplomacy as a stage for a theatrical domestic invasion. Images of the family dog have been scattered across the Pacific-centered wall-map. He appears four times in Russia and floats somewhere off the Gulf of Guinea, and a massive dog covers most …

Marc Selwyn Fine Art
Los Angeles, CA
December 12, 2024

Favorite First Viewings

Faces, John Cassavetes, 1968. ITSOFOMO, David Wojnarowicz, 1991. In Praise of Love, Jean-Luc Godard, 2001. The Clock, Christian Marclay, 2001. Vapour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015. Contribution to Screen Slate's Favorite First Viewings and Discoveries of 2024.

Screen Slate
New York, NY
December 12, 2024

Review of Guy Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

The French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord’s In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni ( We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire , 1979) presents a montage of archival photographs and footage: advertisements, maps, interiors, newsreels, urban streets, and scenes from popular films. Decontextualized and seemingly innocuous images are …

Screen Slate
New York, NY
November 14, 2024

Press Release for Kevin Reinhardt at The Salon Paris

56 HENRY is pleased to present new work by Kevin Reinhardt at The Salon by NADA & The Community from Thursday, October 17th through Sunday, October 20th, 2024. A clown balances on a line, stepping towards and away from its endpoints. It looks equally like a tightrope and a drawing of a tightrope. Solidly black, like the compression of all colors, or the …

56 Henry
New York, NY
October 8, 2024

Review of Gillian Wearing's Dancing in Peckham

A woman sways and twists and turns as strangers pass by—most glance, some stare, and a few dance along with her. Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham (1994) documents the artist dancing with abandon in a train station inside a shopping center in South London. The audio consists of the echoey background noise of the train station; absent is the unknown music …

Screen Slate
New York, NY
September 30, 2024

Press Release for Kevin Reinhardt's 6

56 HENRY is pleased to present 6, an exhibition of new work by Kevin Reinhardt on view from September 4 through October 27, 2024, and Reinhardt’s second with 56 HENRY. Recollection is a discarded garment which beautiful as it may be, does not fit, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an imperishable garment, which fits snugly and comfortably, neither too …

56 Henry
New York, NY
September 4, 2024

Press Release for Arthur Wechsler's Familiars

Cruise Control Gallery presents Familiars , the debut solo exhibition of Bay Area-born, Los Angeles-based painter Arthur Wechsler. The artist conducts an epistemic experiment in ten errant images, set astray from their referents in the strong current of familiarity. Familiars is a record of memory’s work, the mutually constitutive faculties of keeping and …

Cruise Control Gallery
Cambria, CA
June 8, 2024

Wendy's Subway Writing Night-2023

To move to action. To cause, to bring about. A movement, an action, a feeling. Immediate, done without delay. To set forward, in(to) motion. From promere, “to bring forth.” Pro, “forward,” with emere “to take, distribute.” But also prompte, as in “readiness.” A prompt can be a noun or a verb or an adjective. Anything and everything could be or is a prompt, …

Wendy's Subway
Brooklyn, NY
October 23, 2023

Review of Basim Magdy's Flickers of Utopia

A dent, a gouge, a slight hollow. The trace of impact, the evidence of action. In The Dent (2014), by the Egyptian-born, Swiss-based artist Basim Magdy, a depression on the façade of a white-gray steel structure reappears throughout. The film, which is set to a non-lyrical, melodic score, features subtitles that at one point read: “it all started with a …

Screen Slate
New York, NY
January 30, 2024

Walking Backwards into a Room

Hand bound first edition book. Print copy on view at the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive and Pallas San Francisco. Images and excerpts featured at Anyonegirl. Listed on the The Center New Books List by Center for Book Arts. Published August 2023

Conclusion: Walking Backwards into a Room

The challenge of titling this book is the challenge of titling anything: you want the name to fit the thing, without reducing the thing. This was especially the case after a year of collaboration and correspondence. We considered “wanderthoughts,” relating it to the walks we took while calling each other from far away. There was “walking thoughts”—walking …

Published in Walking Backwards into a Room
May 2023

Artist Statement: Speaking of the Ineffable

When I learned to sew, the first thing I was told was that thread must be stronger than what it holds together. When visiting a memory, I dust its surface over with the present moment. I draw myself further away from the memory itself, and closer to my preceding encounters with it. In this show, I explore the fragmentation of memory committed by remembrance …

Artist Statement accompanying solo exhibition, Speaking of the Ineffable.

List Art Center, Providence, RI.
January 2022.

Needing Kneading Needing

My first experience with ritual occurred at a Jewish Sunday school. I was instructed to decorate a challah cover. I engaged with ritual before I knew what it was, and did so with the oblivion only known in youth—and which permeates the subconscious in special ways. The root of “ritual,” from the Latin ritus as in “religious observance,” rhymes nicely with …
Exhibition Essay accompanying Cecilia Vicuña's Spin Spin Triangulene

Published by The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum
August 2022

Presence, Play, and Postmodernism: Rethinking Zoom

Talking on the phone, I multitask—flip through an old journal, lint roll a sweater, brew coffee, butter a bagel. I do all of this while my attention appears unbroken to the receiving end. Phone calls are illusory in so far as I imagine attention where I do not confer it, presume the person on the other end to not similarly flip through journals, fold …

Published in The College Hill Independent
November 2020

"To Write as if Already Dead" by Kate Zambreno: The Body of the Author

Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” saw a challenge, two years later, with Michel Foucault’s lecture “What Is an Author?” Kate Zambreno abbreviates the distinction between these two works: “Barthes wants to kill the author, Foucault wants the author to take on the appearance of a dead man.” Zambreno’s two-part book, To Write as If Already …

Published by ZYZZYVA Magazine
June 2021

"Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?" by Jenny Diski: Seeing, Being, Naming

Jenny Diski’s posthumous collection, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? (448 pages; Bloomsbury), consists of thirty-three essays, selected from the over two hundred the prolific British author wrote for the London Review of Books up until her death in 2016 at 68. Opening with a lighthearted account of a breakup and concluding with a humble …

Published by ZYZZYVA Magazine
June 2021

La Pipopipette

Seated atop a wicker desk chair inside a white box of a room, ten feet by ten feet with curtains all around, Dot smiles gently, thinking of the difference between a box and a cube. With curtains closing in on her quadrilaterally, the two corners of her mouth advance further towards the ceiling. Her smile rests beneath a square of cloth, itself protecting …

Published in Expat Press
November 2023

Published in Volume 1
May 2022

Making Dough: Thoughts on Mika Rottenberg's Surreal Videos

A kneaded piece of dough slides through a hole in the wall. Flattened bright-red fingernails are flattened. Human tears drip through an opening in the floor and evaporate into sweat. Artist Mika Rottenberg features these images in the assembly lines of her surreal, provocative short films. Rottenberg, widely acclaimed in the art world, currently works out …

Published in The College Hill Independent
November 2019

Q&A with Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Kelly Cressio-Moeller’s debut poetry collection, Shade of Blue Trees (79 pages; Two Sylvias Press), consists of thirty-seven poems, broken into four parts. Cressio-Moeller has long established herself as both a visual artist and writer, with her widely published poetry earning nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net awards. …

Published in ZYZZYVA Magazine
August 2021

Wendy's Subway Writing Night

POEM [one/eye] Can't Write: or To Write: A poem with the words of its own making [Alternate POEM] Blank Page Paralysis. Purity of Conception. yet/let… [I write] a word [I, for instance,] from which many flow. The POEM [1/I] concludes/continues. one-eyed POEM for/to: The End. again Cont. Write a poem with the words of its own making. [Alternate Prompt] Begin …
Room for a Poem

again after again, it is already always. all this space in such a small room. all this room in such a small place. always after always, it is already again.
Poesis and Performance: Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly

View Full Essay
Review of Mark Leckey's 3 Songs from the Liver

The source material at the center of Mark Leckey’s current exhibition at Gladstone is, in his words, “some piece of shit.” This piece of shit, a clip that Leckey found on Twitter in 2021, repeats 21 times in a video that loops across two screens around 55 times per day, five days a week, for four months straight. The ostensibly banal clip features a boy …
Exhibition Text for Cynthia Talmadge's Chevy Chase Syndrome

A wife has taken over her diplomat-husband’s office in the US embassy in New Delhi, recasting the cartography of diplomacy as a stage for a theatrical domestic invasion. Images of the family dog have been scattered across the Pacific-centered wall-map. He appears four times in Russia and floats somewhere off the Gulf of Guinea, and a massive dog covers most …
Favorite First Viewings

Faces, John Cassavetes, 1968. ITSOFOMO, David Wojnarowicz, 1991. In Praise of Love, Jean-Luc Godard, 2001. The Clock, Christian Marclay, 2001. Vapour, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2015. Contribution to Screen Slate's Favorite First Viewings and Discoveries of 2024.
Review of Guy Debord's In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

The French theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord’s In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni ( We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire , 1979) presents a montage of archival photographs and footage: advertisements, maps, interiors, newsreels, urban streets, and scenes from popular films. Decontextualized and seemingly innocuous images are …
Press Release for Kevin Reinhardt at The Salon Paris

56 HENRY is pleased to present new work by Kevin Reinhardt at The Salon by NADA & The Community from Thursday, October 17th through Sunday, October 20th, 2024. A clown balances on a line, stepping towards and away from its endpoints. It looks equally like a tightrope and a drawing of a tightrope. Solidly black, like the compression of all colors, or the …
Review of Gillian Wearing's Dancing in Peckham

A woman sways and twists and turns as strangers pass by—most glance, some stare, and a few dance along with her. Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham (1994) documents the artist dancing with abandon in a train station inside a shopping center in South London. The audio consists of the echoey background noise of the train station; absent is the unknown music …
Press Release for Kevin Reinhardt's 6

56 HENRY is pleased to present 6, an exhibition of new work by Kevin Reinhardt on view from September 4 through October 27, 2024, and Reinhardt’s second with 56 HENRY. Recollection is a discarded garment which beautiful as it may be, does not fit, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an imperishable garment, which fits snugly and comfortably, neither too …
Press Release for Arthur Wechsler's Familiars

Cruise Control Gallery presents Familiars , the debut solo exhibition of Bay Area-born, Los Angeles-based painter Arthur Wechsler. The artist conducts an epistemic experiment in ten errant images, set astray from their referents in the strong current of familiarity. Familiars is a record of memory’s work, the mutually constitutive faculties of keeping and …
Wendy's Subway Writing Night-2023

To move to action. To cause, to bring about. A movement, an action, a feeling. Immediate, done without delay. To set forward, in(to) motion. From promere, “to bring forth.” Pro, “forward,” with emere “to take, distribute.” But also prompte, as in “readiness.” A prompt can be a noun or a verb or an adjective. Anything and everything could be or is a prompt, …
Review of Basim Magdy's Flickers of Utopia

A dent, a gouge, a slight hollow. The trace of impact, the evidence of action. In The Dent (2014), by the Egyptian-born, Swiss-based artist Basim Magdy, a depression on the façade of a white-gray steel structure reappears throughout. The film, which is set to a non-lyrical, melodic score, features subtitles that at one point read: “it all started with a …
Walking Backwards into a Room
Conclusion: Walking Backwards into a Room

The challenge of titling this book is the challenge of titling anything: you want the name to fit the thing, without reducing the thing. This was especially the case after a year of collaboration and correspondence. We considered “wanderthoughts,” relating it to the walks we took while calling each other from far away. There was “walking thoughts”—walking …
Artist Statement: Speaking of the Ineffable

When I learned to sew, the first thing I was told was that thread must be stronger than what it holds together. When visiting a memory, I dust its surface over with the present moment. I draw myself further away from the memory itself, and closer to my preceding encounters with it. In this show, I explore the fragmentation of memory committed by remembrance …
Needing Kneading Needing

My first experience with ritual occurred at a Jewish Sunday school. I was instructed to decorate a challah cover. I engaged with ritual before I knew what it was, and did so with the oblivion only known in youth—and which permeates the subconscious in special ways. The root of “ritual,” from the Latin ritus as in “religious observance,” rhymes nicely with …
Presence, Play, and Postmodernism: Rethinking Zoom

Talking on the phone, I multitask—flip through an old journal, lint roll a sweater, brew coffee, butter a bagel. I do all of this while my attention appears unbroken to the receiving end. Phone calls are illusory in so far as I imagine attention where I do not confer it, presume the person on the other end to not similarly flip through journals, fold …
"To Write as if Already Dead" by Kate Zambreno: The Body of the Author

Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” saw a challenge, two years later, with Michel Foucault’s lecture “What Is an Author?” Kate Zambreno abbreviates the distinction between these two works: “Barthes wants to kill the author, Foucault wants the author to take on the appearance of a dead man.” Zambreno’s two-part book, To Write as If Already …
"Why Didn't You Just Do What You Were Told?" by Jenny Diski: Seeing, Being, Naming

Jenny Diski’s posthumous collection, Why Didn’t You Just Do What You Were Told? (448 pages; Bloomsbury), consists of thirty-three essays, selected from the over two hundred the prolific British author wrote for the London Review of Books up until her death in 2016 at 68. Opening with a lighthearted account of a breakup and concluding with a humble …
La Pipopipette

Seated atop a wicker desk chair inside a white box of a room, ten feet by ten feet with curtains all around, Dot smiles gently, thinking of the difference between a box and a cube. With curtains closing in on her quadrilaterally, the two corners of her mouth advance further towards the ceiling. Her smile rests beneath a square of cloth, itself protecting …
Making Dough: Thoughts on Mika Rottenberg's Surreal Videos

A kneaded piece of dough slides through a hole in the wall. Flattened bright-red fingernails are flattened. Human tears drip through an opening in the floor and evaporate into sweat. Artist Mika Rottenberg features these images in the assembly lines of her surreal, provocative short films. Rottenberg, widely acclaimed in the art world, currently works out …
Q&A with Kelly Cressio-Moeller

Kelly Cressio-Moeller’s debut poetry collection, Shade of Blue Trees (79 pages; Two Sylvias Press), consists of thirty-seven poems, broken into four parts. Cressio-Moeller has long established herself as both a visual artist and writer, with her widely published poetry earning nominations for the Pushcart Prize, Best New Poets, and Best of the Net awards. …