Anthony Baab: Cover the Earth
Curated by Danny Orendorff
Threewalls (Chicago, IL)
June 12, 2015 – August 1, 2015
Artist Website
Images at bottom of page
Press
– “Review: Anthony Baab at Threewalls,” Amy Haddad, New City Chicago, July 2015
About the Exhibition
Within his current body of work, Cover the Earth, Anthony Baab experiments with objects and materials associated with consumerism – packaging, advertisements, and logos. Baab views an explicit sense of command and function conveyed through these containers, perhaps more so than the commodities they hold or represent. Attempting to regenerate these objects into something otherwise and redirect their pre-fixed purposes towards aesthetic ends, Baab confronts the challenge of making these objects his own. The work is compelled by a sense of misbehavior, evoking the spirit and ethos of adolescence, inspired by doodling on a shoe, covering a room with posters, and building a fort.
As an itinerant, traveling project, Cover the Earth is an ever expanding and mutating form that undergoes a complete transformation from one location to the next. Between each location, the sculptures are broken down, repaired and re-purposed, much like a collage. Adding as many brands and objects as possible, the meaning and function of these products dissolve over and over again, allowing for new meanings and associations to form.
Anthony Baab was born in Dallas, Texas and is currently based in New Orleans, LA, where he teaches as Professor of Practice for the Newcombe Art Department at Tulane University. He studied Painting and Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute before obtaining an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Cornell University. He is a Charlotte Street Award Recipient (2006), Fine Arts Work Center Provincetown Fellow (2014-2015), and Skowhegan resident (2015) that has exhibited at: The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art (KS), Nelson Atkins Museum of Art (KC), Tompkins Projects (NY), Haw Contemporary (KC) and Grand Arts (KC). Collections include: Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art, and the Microsoft Corporate Art Collection.
