Two artists reach into history to express the vulnerabilities of life and truth in a modern age.

 

Employing the techniques of the classical Dutch Baroque Vanitas paintings, Baker creates still-life work of flowers, fruit, vegetables and skulls that explore themes of death, transience and renewal. Her subjects symbolize aging, sickness and decay–the fleetingness of life. They are reverently and sumptuously painted in lush, vibrant colors-their beauty ignorant of their impermanence.

 

The Dutch Vanitas paintings emerged in 17th century Europe at the beginning of free-market capitalism. They sought to caution the worship of wealth over morality and remind the viewer of the certainty of death and futility of material pursuit. Today, Baker reintroduces us to these allegorical paintings in a very different time of human history. The Baroque themes are enduring, yet the paintings take on an additional meaning in a time where truth, values and liberty are also fleeting and impermanent-and just as fragile and vulnerable as the physical body.  There is a new relevance to these paintings, marked by late stage capitalism -a social experiment in its old age, its best years gone- as if we are living in its last gasp.

Xan Peters also uses the skull as a symbol of lost corporeality and truth. He sculpts fine white porcelain to create skulls of extinct animals. They are smooth, almost translucent, and etched with the stories of the species’ lives when they walked on Earth. These etchings, a kind of hieroglyphics of the artist's creation,  remind us that these animals had profound and distinct existences that have been forgotten or mythologized. These works serve as a voice for the voiceless, and as an insistence that we acknowledge our own powerlessness to tell our stories after we are gone.

Jordan Nobuko Baker is an artist living and working in the Hudson Valley, New York. She attended Tufts University, received a BFA in Art History from Syracuse University and an MFA in mixed media from SUNY Albany.  Baker added oil painting to her art practice in 2018 and has a focus on still life painting inspired by the intricacies of nature and earthly cycles.

Xan Peters studied Paleontology at the University of Montana for three years before switching to Studio Art and Museum Studies. It was here that the synergies between the worlds of art and science collided for him. He received his MFA from Tufts, where he taught painting after graduating. He now teaches painting at the University of Tampa.