Broadway is pleased to present Mapping the territory, our first exhibition with Los Angeles Artist Teresa Baker (Mandan,Hidatsa, b. 1985).

Baker’s wall-based works are made primarily from artificial turf that is subsequently adorned with a variety of materials from acrylic paint to deerskin, yarn and willow branches. The astroturf support is first cut into asymmetrical shapes reminiscent of animal hides and the cartographic borders suggested by the show’s title. It is precisely at this juncture of the most basic material expression of “land”, and its subsequent adornment with materials providing cultural specificity, that the work accrues meaning.

The slippage between base commercial mediums and the gravity of natural ones echoes Baker’s confluence of Native tradition with those of Modernism in painting. The slyly persistent geometry of her compositions creates a productive friction with their overall abandonment of the rectilinear support. A similar tension occurs between a commitment to pure abstraction and the unavoidable suggestion of the natural world, whether it be the flat expanse of a prairie landscape or the infinite night sky.

In this sense, Baker achieves a sublime beauty that is supported by a tripartite scaffold of pure form, a peculiar materiality, and an atmospheric, loosely representational approach.