100th ANNUAL Solo Exhibitions

Adi Sundoro: Seeking Into The Folds

For Glen Baldridge's The Pond, a body of water and the dense woods that surround it in rural Maine serve as the setting for his experimental prints. Featuring artworks produced over the past ten years, the project started while the artist was based in New York City and was forced to explore the woods from afar. Fascinated by its dynamics, he continues to make artworks “triggered by both unseen forces and wildlife” that spark his imagination. Together, the prints combine what seems to be the solitary, peaceful lives of animals with hallucinatory, sinister landscapes that signify fear of the unknown.

To make the images, Baldridge began by setting up motion-activated hunting cameras near a pond, which captured thousands of pictures of animals’ nocturnal activities. He focuses on those that he describes as “animal selfies.” Three of his most recent – For Real, Weather Tamer and Moon Wobble – are large-scale prints that comprise the core of the exhibition. Baldridge uses a unique, experimental process to make them. He first creates vibrant, gestural abstractions in watercolor and ink on paper. He then screenprints a clear UV ink on top of that image to protect the areas of color already on the paper. From there, he prints additional passages of dynamic color. The results are muted renderings of wildlife within a multi-colored, psychedelic world.

These visually dynamic prints are complemented by smaller-scaled prints that focus on nature’s haunting qualities. The series “Modus Tollens (Woodwose)” is titled after a mythical wild man who lived in the woods, as first described in medieval European folklore. Printed as photogravures, the process yields tonally rich black-and-white images featuring nature, mostly devoid of animal life. The series culminates with a ghostly, animal-like shadow that evokes a phantasmic fear of the woods.

Read more in the Gallery Notes.

Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter’s Epilogues of the Black Madonna is the first in her hometown of Philadelphia. The show expands upon her widely lauded photographic series, “Consecration to Mary.” In this innovative presentation, Baxter presents the series as a part of a larger, sculptural installation that draws together Christian worship furnishings, medieval Marian iconography, 19th century photography and self-portraiture. Rooted in Black feminist thought and transformative justice, Baxter envisions new ways to reclaim the sanctity of Black girlhood

In the “Consecration to Mary” series, started in 2021, Baxter reimagines Philadelphia painter Thomas Eakins’ (1844-1916) sexually-exploitative nude photographs of an unidentified Black girl from 1882. She combats this painful history by inserting herself into the images and shielding the child. For Baxter, Eakins’ pictures are misrepresentations of Black girlhood and demonstrate historical forms of “adultification,” a socio-political bias that treats children as adults. Today, it is understood that the sexualization and criminalization of young Black girls has far-reaching implications, including their punitive treatment in the educational and judicial systems.

In the exhibition, images framed like daguerreotypes are displayed on Christian prayer kneelers, which also serve as vitrines. They are complemented by Cult of the Virgin, large-scale, photographic self-portraits presented as a three-part devotional altarpiece, a format common in European churches since the Middle Ages. Baxter describes the Black Madonna, “not as icon or martyr, but as guardian – a figure whose power lies in refusal, endurance and care. Devotion becomes an ethics and art-making a practice of protection, one that challenges inherited narratives of trauma while creating space for collective healing, remembrance, and repair.”

Read more in the Gallery Notes.

Jakarta-based Adi Sundoro has created an installation composed of printed wrappers for the popular street food gorengan, or Indonesian fried fritters, which are commonly repurposed from confidential documents. Gorengan literally translates to “fried things,” and is a generic category used to describe a broad array of foods, both savory and sweet, that are deep-fried. These egg-battered foods are filled with a variety of things, such as banana, cabbage, carrot, cassava, jackfruit, sweet potato, tempeh (fermented soybean cakes) and tofu – in numerous combinations. The snacks are found throughout Indonesia and are often sold by mobile street carts or market vendors.

At the core of Sundoro’s project is his observation that confidential documents, often containing personal identification, government data or legal information, are recycled by street vendors as wrapped packaging for their gorengan. As a result, there is a massive data leak at the street level, which he describes as an “urban phenomenon,” related to his observation of his prints circulating around the world.

For the sculptural prints on view in Seeking Into The Folds, the artist considers that “for some people, the data on the fried food packaging may only be considered as incidental information. However, I wonder, what would happen if this data fell into the wrong hands?” The artist amasses and combines information directly from many different gorengan wrappers, such as official texts, signatures, photos and stamps, to use in his prints. He collages this reprinted information and uses the new prints to reconstruct food packaging, as in the series “Fritters Wrappers,” or as colorful wall sculptures in his series “Data Wilderness.”

Read more in the Gallery Notes.