Alana Frances Baer
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Alana Frances Baer
Exhibition Text for Cynthia Talmadge's Chevy Chase Syndrome (abridged)

There is a room somewhere, anywhere, abroad. It is the 60s and this room is a Consular Residence, or every Consular Residence. Each room features the same curtains, the same set of twin beds, the same side table, lamp, carpet, fan, and so on. Details are specific and standardized from room to room from country to country—with the exception of a single local …

Marc Selwyn
Los Angeles, CA
December, 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

Untitled (Lauren)


Gelatin silver print
16 x 20 in print from 4 x 5 in negative
2024

Wendy's Subway Writing Night

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
New York, NY
October 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

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

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

Seven Sentences Walks Poems

“We want an intelligence that’s tall and silver, oblique and black, purring and amplifying its décor: a thin thing, a long thing, a hundred videos, a boutique.” Or, “Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft.” Then later, “Scaffolding is analogy.” These sentences are from the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s 2017 Occasional Work and …

Published in Walking Backwards into a Room
May 2023

Palimpsest Painting

Paint, molding paste, tape, needle, thread, and pigment on stretched canvas
72 x 48 x 2 in
2022


Exhibited in Speaking of the Ineffable
January 2022

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

one self and else where


Oil, gesso, and molding paste on panel
48 x 24 x 1/2 in
2022


Exhibited in Arecibo: Missed Connections
May 2022

Frances

Oil, molding paste, and pigment on stretched canvas
48 x 36 x 2 in
2022

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.

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

I am getting ahead of myself


Pigment on paper
5 x 7 in
2022

The first person present

Pigment on paper
5 x 7 in
2022

"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

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

My Family in My Hand

Pigment on paper
5 x 7 in
2022

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

Exhibition Text for Cynthia Talmadge's Chevy Chase Syndrome (abridged)

There is a room somewhere, anywhere, abroad. It is the 60s and this room is a Consular Residence, or every Consular Residence. Each room features the same curtains, the same set of twin beds, the same side table, lamp, carpet, fan, and so on. Details are specific and standardized from room to room from country to country—with the exception of a single local …
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 …
Untitled (Lauren)
Wendy's Subway Writing Night

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 …
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 …
Walking Backwards into a Room
Seven Sentences Walks Poems

“We want an intelligence that’s tall and silver, oblique and black, purring and amplifying its décor: a thin thing, a long thing, a hundred videos, a boutique.” Or, “Memory’s architecture is neither palatial nor theatrical but soft.” Then later, “Scaffolding is analogy.” These sentences are from the Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s 2017 Occasional Work and …
Palimpsest Painting
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 …
one self and else where
Frances
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 …
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 …
I am getting ahead of myself
The first person present
"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 …
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 …
My Family in My Hand
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. …