David Ireland
collaboration with Richard Baker
"Overhead", 2001 ongoing installation

David Ireland, in association with Gallery Paule Anglim, anoints Julie Baker Fine Art with an ongoing installation. Ireland, noted for officiating at the inception of Headlands Center for the Arts and the groundbreaking of the new San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, initiated the opening of this new site for contemporary art in California. In his installation, "Overhead", a collaboration with gallery co-founder Richard Baker, Mr. Ireland has taken 13 ceiling tiles and painted them in his signature palette. As Mr. Ireland says, "Normally the wall planes are the most obvious and traditional. In this case, we are working on activating the overhead or ceiling plane." Inspiration for the piece came as Mr. Baker says, "I wanted to make a piece that inhabits the interstices of the gallery. That in between space that is there, then not. "

Ireland and Baker share a long history of collaboration. They first met at UC Santa Cruz in 1988 where Baker, an art student helped on the installation of "A Decade Documented". Since that time, Baker has assisted and collaborated with Ireland on several shows for Paule Anglim and Jay Gorney Modern Art, and a set for Douglas Dunn Dance Company. Together they unearthed the chunk of concrete that had been under Ireland’s house for about ten years and was used in the groundbreaking piece for SF MOMA.

David Ireland is a seminal artist from Northern California, recognized internationally with major museum exhibitions and commissions including the Museum of Modern Art, The New Museum, The Walker, ICA Portland, The Mattress Factory, the Hirshhorn & The Whitney Museum. In her book about David Ireland, " You Can't Make Art by Making Art" Betty Klaus says " he has beencalled an urban archeologist, a conceptual sculptor. He has uncanny ability to relate to interior and exterior space with form, light, history and uses. We see what remains from a process." Critics say Ireland practices "restorative Dadaism" and most agree there is "plenty of wisdom in Ireland's oddly matter-of-fact but appreciative regard for life's minor epiphanies."