What do I call you?

In What do I call you?, Lucy Wood Baird uses shards of images, both found and made, as material, collecting bits of the ambient image noise that surrounds us. Created across wide windows of time, these image pieces are stacked, assembled, collaged and built into quietly dimensional objects.

Through this process, the photographic shards relinquish their legibility, democratizing the subject matter as they are incorporated into sculpture either in unison or intermittently as duplicates, shadows, negatives, positives, or mirrors.

The resulting objects and installations feel as if they could be strange artifacts of a future civilization, reassembled from the disembodied recordings of our past and present. The works illuminate the incongruity of photographic identity as simultaneously record, chameleon, and messenger, tapping into the anxiety around false and relative truths emanating from the onslaught of images we encounter daily.

At the exhibition’s core is an investigation into the implication of layering photographic and geologic time using photographic fictive marble and stone. Like a photographic negative, a marble fragment depicts a small fraction of a vast field of material or information cut into a neat square. Each fragment is a unique record of geologic time, alluding to a long-lost history in the language of veins and colors that is no longer legible. Baird further complicates this by treating the photographic fictive marble as a sculptural material, referencing the technique originating in Renaissance painting that mimics the appearance of marble to create an illusion of reality and three-dimensional depth.

Ultimately, the works in What do I call you? examine the slippery dimensionality of the photographic image by arranging image, mirror, plexiglass, marble, fabric, and time into composite sculptural objects. They highlight collage as a process of reorientation, an attempt to understand the world by rearranging pieces of it, and an acknowledgment that the simple act of seeing does not translate to knowing.