Alana Frances Baer

Walking Backwards into a Room

Hand bound first edition book. Print copy on view at Pallas San Francisco and images featured at Anyonegirl. 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

Cynthia Talmadge's Seven Sisters Pool Painting

In Cynthia Talmadge’s latest work, Seven Sisters Pool Painting , an eerily empty indoor pool is covered by a gable ceiling and decorated by two strings of yellow flags, which read BRYN MAWR. The pool is a site for athletic competition, and the school is amongst the Seven Sisters, a group of historically women’s liberal arts colleges in the Northeast. The …

Artwork description for 56 Henry
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.

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 Volume 1
May 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

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 …

Published by The Solomon R Guggenheim Museum
August 2022

Needing Kneading Needing

Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
August 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

My Family in My Hand

Pigment on paper
5 x 7 in
2022

In This Light

Pigment on paper
5 x 7 in
2022

This is for Scale

Pigment on paper
7 x 5 in
2022

Exhibited in Speaking of the Ineffable in January 2022

Slip Through My Fingers

Pigment on paper
7 x 5 in
2022

Forgetting a Dream in the Moment of Its Recollection

Pigment on paper
7 x 5 in
2022