Joell Baxter
Photo by Brad Ogbonna
Joell Baxter’s work takes the form of modular, large-scale woven panels that map walls, floors, and entire rooms.
Using paper that is cut and woven by hand, Baxter is inspired by Anni Albers description of weaving as a kind of portable architecture, where the over-under stitch of the paper creates a “fabric” strong enough to be moved and rearranged in different locations, while remaining flexible enough to conform to the contours of any room. The interlocking warp and weft of each panel forms a grid, recalling the language of minimalist and conceptual art. These grids reveal the trace of their making, as the delicate nature of the paper and the vagaries of the hand cause them to wobble at various points. The dissipation of spatial groundedness alters the experience of the room; the white cube of the gallery seems to move, even as the viewer stays in place. In this way the work simultaneously delineates and destabilizes existing architectures, materializing unseen shifts of light and air.
Brooklyn, NY
Born 1968, Washington, DC. Raised Evanston, IL
2000 MFA University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL
1998 BFA University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL