Perpetual Motion
“Perpetual Motion” from the “Playing with Arsenic” series, 2011 – 2013, by Jamie Baldridge
If you want to know what an inescapable sense of foreboding looks like in the mind of Jamie Baldridge, look hard at his piece “Perpetual Motion” for a moment. The woman by the window is captured at the instant in which some unnamed act of violence rips back the veneer of an ordered existence, replacing security with suffering, comfort with loss. She represents Baldridge’s sense that the world we have constructed for ourselves offers only the slimmest protection against the chaos beyond and his fear that any instant that frail envelope might vanish in a burst of light and noise. “Four years ago I was feeling a lot of anxiety, particularly about America’s role overseas,” said Baldridge, who is endowed professor of new media & digital art at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. “There were a lot of pent-up existential anxieties I was feeling, plus a great deal of sympathy for overseas people to whom these things were happening, who just want to get up and take their kids to school.”
Baldridge’s images are allegories for states of mind and consciousness. Fascinated by the subconscious, the artist looks to his dreams to find the subject matter of his digital assemblages, which he creates in series—like chapters in a novel—with names like Monuments of Want, Belle Epoque, and Dystopia. “When I make a work, there’s rarely a conscious impetus. Much of it derives from dream imagery,” he explained, noting that he keeps a dream journal, finding it to be fertile ground for discovering lines of thinking that he might have forgotten about—or chosen to avoid. “People all over the world dream the same dreams. You dream about your teeth falling out or finding a room in your house that you weren’t aware of. Dreams are a non-binding form that lets people bring their own experience to the works, and I hope there’s enough ambiguity in those icons that the viewer can interpret them for themselves. ‘Perpetual Motion’ is part of a series named Playing with Arsenic. I was thinking about not just mortality but also morality and the difficulty I have with accepting the uncertainties of life. Playing with Arsenic was a way of being cavalier with a subject that’s incredibly toxic and dangerous.”
The only “real” thing in a Jamie Baldridge piece is the model. Everything else is digitally assembled using sophisticated digital modeling software. Camera in hand, Baldridge travels extensively, absorbing environs and gathering thousands of reference photos from which he synthesizes the worlds his subjects wander and the weird contraptions with which they interact. “For Playing with Arsenic, I knew the baroque textures and vintages I wanted, and I traveled mostly through Western Europe to find them,” he said.
Then there’s the machinery. In many works, the characters—straight-backed and stoic against the strange chaos that threatens to engulf them—are fitted with peculiar machines that recall the brass-and-vacuum-tube craftsmanship of the early machine age. “As a boy I always had a fascination with antique machinery,” he said. “My mother had a broken music box that played Debussy. I could see inside it, and I was fascinated. There was a dark romance to it. Now, the machinery I design is a metaphor for mental processes … the way the gears and cogs turn [is] a way to illustrate the over-cranking of the mind. I’ve always been a super-anxious, angsty person. Art has been a way to exorcise that.”
A graduate of LSU School of Art, Jamie Baldridge is an artist member of Baton Rouge Gallery, which affords him opportunities to exhibit alongside former professors of art and thesis advisers. Baldridge credits photographer, former LSU professor, and fellow BRG artist member Tom Neff, with “starting to push me in the direction from being a rather mediocre painter to a fairly decent photographer.”
See more of Jamie Baldridge’s digital compositions as well as video pieces and books at jamiebaldridge.com.
