Alana Frances Baer
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Alana Frances Baer
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
October 2023

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

Needing Kneading Needing

Published by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
August 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

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

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

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


Currently on view in Small Works Show at 440 Gallery, New York through January 5, 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, …
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
Needing Kneading Needing
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
In This Light
This is for Scale
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. …
Slip Through My Fingers
forgetting a dream in the moment of its recollection