Nov 14 - dec 22, 2023*

FIRST WEDNESDAY OPENING: Dec 6, FROM 6 - 9PM

ARTICULATE ARTIST TALK: SUNDAY, Dec 10, AT 4PM.

NORMAL GALLERY HOURS: TUE - SUN, 12PM - 6PM

FOLLOW US AT BRGALLERY FOR UPDATES AND IMAGES!

*Note: BRG will be closed Nov 23 - 24 for the holiday.

Jamie Baldridge is a surrealist who creates psychological tableaux by manipulating and constructing photographs that externalize the inner dialogues of consciousness. Baldridge first discovered the artist inside himself as a child after reading 101 Fairy Tales, a book he happened to find in a trunk in his grandmother's attic. Through the use of digital manipulation, he creates deeply symbolic and stunning images that confront his culture and illuminate the abstruse nature of the human condition. Baldridge stages sets for photographing which he then finishes using digital editing.

I believe the truth of our nature, and by extension reality, lies somewhere deep within our subconscious, tucked into the dusty corners of our minds, immune to any prudence of form and willfully defying logic or causality.
The images I create and the stories I often write to accompany them are retrieved from my own dreaming life and similar altered states of consciousness. Each work serves as a semiotic diving bell into personal idiosyncrasies which compel me to create a world inhabited by the same archetypal characters that writers and philosophers have engaged with for millennia in their own attempts to illuminate the human experience. This ersatz facsimile is beset by superposition and is all at once joyous, profane, tragic-comical, and dogged by existential dread. My heroines and heroes go about their often futile tasks in an analog of our own modern lives, seeking meaning, yet mired in angst, tedium, and mendacity. With the innocent zeal of a cargo cult, they symbolically mock our real-world endeavors, yet proceed with enviable perseverance, trundling alongside the arrow of time toward the inevitable, the ineluctable, the inconceivable. The moment when our consciousness will sublimate into the void and we will be no more.
These works are my open invitation to the viewer to explore with curiosity the humor, befuddlement, wonder, fear, and awe represented not in the art set before them, but in the complex and contradictory tides that are sovereign over the keel of their own mind.

Baldridge grew up in New Iberia, LA. He earned his B.F.A. and M.F.A. at Louisiana State University and has gone on to exhibit in galleries throughout the world. He has published two books and his work has been featured on album covers and commercial campaigns, as well as in ARTnews, Zoom, Harper's Bazaar Russia, Photo+, Juxtapoz, NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Dubai's The National, and many more. His works can be found in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the Sterling & Francine Clark Art Institute, and Cornell University in addition to local collections in the Ogden Museum of Southern Art & Louisiana State University's Special Collections.

Baldridge currently resides in Lafayette, LA, and is a Professor of New Media & Digital Art at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette.

This exhibition is presented alongside the latest works from Malaika Favorite, Frankie Gould, and April Hammock. All works from these artists are on view, free of charge, during regular gallery hours (12 - 6 p.m., Tue - Sun) from Nov 14 - Dec 22, 2023.