Availing himself of very new and very old technologies, Jimmy Baker makes works brimming with color and texture. He paints with a full range of hues and gestures, creating thick surface layers from his paint. Then, running the canvases through a digital printer, he adds sprayed images over the painted surfaces. The resulting works can be both beautiful and confounding.
Drawing from images found on the Internet, among other sources, Baker mixes politically charged photographs with banal ones, suggesting that they “cancel each other out,” erasing the hierarchy of meaning. He also manipulates and removes certain pertinent details, so that what remains does not offer any specific readability.