• Nancy Baker
  • Fade Out, 2011
  • Archivally printed digital images, cut and pasted on paper, with glitter, acrylic paint
  • 11 x 14 inches
  • Inquire

Over the years, Nancy Baker’s iconography has come to include relatively familiar appropriations and deliberate misappropriations from illuminated manuscripts, cartoons and pop art. And yet, despite her expanding archive of characters and events, every carefully wrought new piece seems freshly minted. Recently, her source material has expanded to the lexicon of war and weaponry, overlaid with the iconic corporate messages of rampant consumerism. War is peace, war is money, war is the never ending romance of a country unencumbered by the memories of foreign soldiers on its soil. In a country which immortalizes its rifle toting backwoods heroes, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone are the epitome of romance and collective delusional thinking. Baker’s grenades jab at the Hollywood trope of the glamour of violence, and each grenade lives in a nest of glittery spectacle, embedded with flowers and jewels. Charleton Heston’s memorable soliloquy, “I’ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands” echoes a transforming nihilism, death weapon as fetishistic love object.