3/26: BLUE GLUE AND OTHER EXPLORATIONS // new work by MARA BAKER at Happy Collaborationists

2011 March 21

by theacreproject

BLUE GLUE AND OTHER EXPLORATIONS
new work by MARA BAKER
March 21-26, 2011

Closing Reception: Saturday, March 26, 6-10
Gallery Hours by appointment: Contact info@happycollaborationists.com

Happy Collaborationists Exhibition Space
1254 N Noble St

BLUE GLUE AND OTHER EXPLORATIONS is a new body of work consisting of drawings, photographs and a site-specific installation that grew directly out of a residency this past summer with ACRE located in rural Southwest Wisconsin. The installation will feature a collection of piled drawings and sculptural constructions that morph and respond to the unique exhibition space at Happy Collaborationists. Materials crucial to the project include; Blue Glue (aka blue painters tape) as a means to draw, pile, adhere and bind and 6 years of accumulated studio detritus (precious, abandoned, minuscule and substantial). The work explores the mental and physical act of collection and how drawing can simultaneously reveal and bury a material history.

MARA BAKER is a Chicago based artist working in drawing/installation. Her work is inspired by histories – imagined and real, minuscule and epic, forgotten and memorialized. She is a graduate of Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA, 2007) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 2005). Recent Exhibitions include: Rise over Run at WHAT IT IS (Oak Park, IL), What Remains at The Soap Factory (Minneapolis, MN), Scavenger Constructs at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery (Chicago, IL), Centrifugal Force at Detroit Industrial Projects, (Detroit, MI) and With What We Can Carry at the Annex Art Center, (Toronto ON, Canada). Maracurrently teaches Drawing and Two-Dimensional Studies at The College of Dupage, Glen Ellyn, IL.

More information about Mara Baker can be found at marabaker.com