Angell Gallery

ANGELL GALLERY is pleased to present Bonnie Baxter’s first solo show at the gallery. The exhibition entitled, “Jane’s Journey,” will be held in the East Gallery from January 22 to February 19. An opening night reception will be held on Saturday, January 22nd from 6 – 9pm. Seemingly standing on the edge of space and time, Bonnie Baxter’s alter ego masterpiece “Jane” is an artwork, a person, and a kind of emanation, a symbol of manifested zeitgeist, all in one. Continually engaged with and undertaking her eponymous journey, Jane’s particular state of being is effectively a powerful expression of Baxter’s searching artistic practice; having settled on a definite vessel in the shape of her own self in “Jane” costume, Baxter recalls everywoman popular figures from film noir heroines to the mainstream Dick and Jane children’s novels, engaging a whole range of reference. But Jane is also the artist’s platinum blonde doppelganger, and a reflection of her life as a whole. She is a symbol for the artist herself, and through her for us, of the inscrutability of human nature, the opaque mirror one’s own self presents, and the more-or-less universally felt need that to live life more truly as it ought to be lived, human beings must quest in search of themselves – whatever that may mean. Jane both belies our ability to do so, while underlining the need to continue on. We never see her face but follow her throughout her travels as she visits and revisits the locations around the world that in some shape or form have made her what she is. Jane practically hovers with her back to us, sometimes accompanied by a giant, ghostly dog – perhaps a kind of familiar spirit, adding to the dreamlike, slightly occult atmosphere of the series. Materializing out of a vast network of source material and crafty invention, Jane is both a mystical searcher and an end in her own self; the destination she implicitly proposes by her search is in fact her own existence, and in this sense she presents the perfect modern trope, self-reflexivity in the very form of self-reflexivity. In Baxter’s series then, a few things are set down as definitive: the action of seeking is equated to the act of finding; identity is personal, communal, and archetypal, and living is ritualized; but also vice versa, as rituality – both artistic and otherwise – is seen as inseparable from life and being. Jane’s Journey then is a type of new mythology, and the central figure herself constitutes a powerful new myth. In a slyly ouroborus, putatively endless presentation, artistic process itself is analogized to lived life, all our lives. Jane is universal and at once a deeply personal, discrete agency for Baxter, and represents the fusion of basically every fundamental in the artist’s life, the coming together of all the strands. Bonnie Baxter’s work has been featured in galleries throughout North and South America, Europe, and China. Her work has been published in Transatlantic Passages: Literary and Cultural Relations between Quebec and Francophone Europe. Moreover, Bonnie has taught in the Print Media Program at Concordia University, Montréal (Québec) since 1984.