Two Art Reviews on Nancy Baker's newest works
http://joannemattera.blogspot.com/2011/05/atlanta-part-2-guns-glitter-and-youth.html
North Carolina-based artist Nancy Baker has a taste for unconventional pairings, too. Her glitter, watercolor and collage-on-paper works, also at Marcia Wood Gallery, suggest the Vietnam-era trope of a daisy placed into a gun barrel repeated ad infinitum. Like James Rosenquist with a flatter, more graphic Victorian decoupage imagination, Baker’s “New/Improved” mashes up grenades and guns, plastic toy soldiers and other symbols of destruction with a girlyfied catalogue of glitter, flowers and other decorative gewgaws. In “Charnel,” Baker gooses the luxury French brand Chanel and its iconic intersecting “C’s” in a collage whose flowing green diamonds, mannequins and skeletons in top hats suggest a challenge to crass and bleating icons of luxury. (“Frag Grenade,” below.)
Like Mattera’s work, the busy, action-filled images can suggest a kind of tapestry or wallpaper. It’s our own consumption-wallpapered imaginations, colonized by Porky Pig and Coco Chanel. In Baker’s work, everything is a product in a shop window, set into a cushy pillow of velvet or lit like the Hope Diamond, the better for the artist to critique the core American value — above God and country — of merchandising. In place of a wink, Baker loves glitter or a graphic sparkle to enunciate her sly attitude.
