drkrm/gallery/west is delighted to announce an exhibition of Family Vacation, Karen Baker’s photographs shot while on the consummate road trip to Boise, Idaho with The Baby. Every family vacation you’ve ever taken as a child, documented. An opening reception for the photographer will be held on Saturday, September 11th from 6-9 pm. The exhibit will be on view through September 26th, 2010
The Baby, a rhetorical figure in Baker’s work appears here in the guise of tourist in the narrative of the family vacation. American culture is investigated as a social subtext, connecting the past century to the current one. This universal experience is celebrated in landscape, architectural and classic snapshot photographs.
“We’ve all been trapped in the car with our parents and assorted surly siblings on an interminable road trip that, in reflection, was the best time we ever had,†Karen Baker explains. “These images recall those vulnerable and now burnished memories alive in all of us.â€
Art critic Peter Franks says the following about Baker’s work: “For photo-purists, the recurrence of the dopey gray lump of cloth in photos worthy of Robert Adams or Stephen Shore, or rest his soul, Julius Shulman is a gnat worthy annoyance, a blemish that shows up time and again almost like a scratch on Baker’s lens. But for the rest of us, The Baby is Baker’s “beard†, the cover that gives her the moxie to replicate various of contemporary photography’s horaiest tropes.â€
Ms. Baker is a crossover artist from the field of fashion, having established a successful career in various areas of fashion design for the past 20 years. Her interest in the disappearance of particular details of American culture, drove her to document both the banal and beautiful aspects of everyday America. Her images offer the viewer a perception of what appears to be real and promotes the idea that not all we see is what actually exists.
