'Baker's Dozen' at Julie Baker Fine Art Artweek January Issue: April 4, 2002 Although no one quite remembers who first made the pronouncement that painting is dead, recent large group exhibitions such as Public Offerings at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, UltraBaroque at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the recent Whitney Biennial have made abundantly clear that painting is definitely alive and well. Baker's Dozen, an engaging exhibition of paintings by thiteen local and national artists at Julie Baker Fine Art in Grass Valley, further attests to this fact. Striking is the fact that despite the huge amount of visual information communicated be the gallery's carpeted floor, textured walls, and acoustic tiled ceiling, there is a sense of balanced energy to the show. This cohesiveness is achieved in part by the installation Overhead created by sculptor and conceptual artist David Ireland. Invited to create a work for the new space, Ireland chose to manipulate the acoustic ceiling grid and requested specific tiles from it, which he painted various primary colors and green. Ireland then reinstalled these tiles in the ceiling, adding a few others made from materials found in his studio: a square of yellow wood in one corner; a green painted top of a banker's box in anaother-and also removed additional tiles to expose the substructure of the ceiling, as he has done in other places. Perhaps it is the inventiveness of Ireland's sculptural approach to this often neglected architectural plane, and attention to such details as having all the colored tiles touch at some point and "connect" through walls(e.g. where a red rectangle "goes through" a wall, it is visible on both sides of it) that underscore the feeling of cohesiveness in this visually busy space. The painting selection represents some current art trends and definitely states gallerist Julie Baker's preferences for color, movement, and conceptual suggestion. Consonant with this, several of these artist's works reveal the influence of well-known twentieth-century masters. Examples include Erin Noel's Next Door, with it's gestural planes of color that suggest Hans Hofman's and Nicholas de Stael's mid-century explorations; Nellie King Soloman's huge painting As Is, for which she poured and pushed ink and medium onto Mylar, that references Sam Francis and Morris Louis; and Tracy Miller's Want Ads which gives an energetic nod to Cezanne's and Matisse's still llifes. One of the most interseting artists working in this way is Jason Middlebrook, whose effervescant Celebration of Debris continues his investigations of the reality of what's beneath the surface of things, with somewhat Surrealist and Kandinsky-like results. Ongoing explorations of the interchange between painting and photography is apparent in Jeremy Adams's Important Painting #16(Other peoples Perceptions), an out of focus painting that turns the currently popular fuzzy image photo aesthetic on its head; and Joe Tonetti's quirky Untitled painting of a headboard-like shape, which assertively fills the canvas like a full-frame photograph. There are a few artists whose more geometric compostional structure and strong draftsmanship attest to an understanding and compelling use of old master techniques. Among these are Kazaan Viveiros's mixed-media Faith/Relic, which includes such elements as a conte drawing of a woman and ginkgo leaves which suggest memory; and Alexandra Eldridge's The World is an Invention of the Spirit, in which the artist has rendered words, doodles, and drawings on a luminous ground of Venetian plaster on panel. The ascendant feature of these works is their beauty and Zen-like meditativeness, qualities that also aptly describe Mary Street's Listen, with it's exquisitely drawn conch/inner ear shape. While conteplating these works, it was a great releif to realize that art can continue to provide a place of refuge and hope in troubled times.