Alabama Reckoner

April 20 - June 30, 2018
Wiregrass Museum of Art

Alabama Reckoner is an exploration of the process-driven work of Alabama artist, Douglas Pierre Baulos. In this exhibition, Baulos presented portraits of artists that inspire him, many of whom are also from Alabama. The portraits consisted of three dimensional found objects, handmade paper, and meticulous details that gave clues to each of the artists’ personalities.

Of his work, Baulos says, “These portrait installations reflect a multitude of interests including grief and mortality, nesting and mending, memory, the physical body, and spirituality. Although I work with emotionally heavy, conceptual themes like loss, mortality, and the power and delicate nature of memory, my work is a reflection of my attempt to live my life in fragile exultation. The process of piecing together an image is a meditative exercise for me, having as much to do with duration as physical texture or of following the thread of mindfulness to create installations that concretize ephemeral and intangible theories of information and time. I merge the abstraction of narrative with the physicality of objects.

In the portraits I’m pinpointing intangible experiences and feelings and creating diorama maps where the sentient, intimate and vestigial are articulated, placing the viewer in their midst. The figurative/vestigial re-telling nature of some of my work stresses the idea of transformation and recovery over victimization. There is an intimacy with the subject becoming object, with the reverence for the past life and the confrontation of the doggedly present body. I’m interested in forms and images that accompany the body and in the traces the body leaves: a bed, a nest, a web, decay and shadows. My work is about exploring where these spaces are suspended for observation and meet at a crossroads between the temporal (fleeting) and concrete (lasting).”

Alabama Reckoner was the second exhibition in a three-part series recognizing Alabama’s Bicentennial and highlighted the 2018 bicentennial theme “Honoring our People.”

The exhibition was made possible by the Alabama State Council on the Arts in celebration of the bicentennial of Alabama’s statehood and by The Daniel Foundation of Alabama.

Doug Baulos, Star Nature/Moth Sheet (Dariana Dervis), 2018, Tomato fiber, found objects, eco prints, rust, paper, thread and porcelain.

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