Sense of Space | Katie Baldwin, Rachel Comminos & Raul Rene Gonzalez

“Sense of Space,” features Katie Baldwin, Rachel Comminos and Raul Rene Gonzalez. This exhibition seeks to create a dialogue between the artists and their connection to place, time, and color. The show includes quilts, hand tufted yarn and concrete. These artists have a sensitivity to materials coupled with a willingness to explore different resources, processes, and surfaces. Their interest is in seeing with one’s own eyes, guided by the mind’s eye, in a pursuit of a deepening personal vision.

Katie Baldwin

In 2021, as a Fulbright Scholar, I explored the traces of human activity, transformations, and reconstructions of the Taiwanese landscape. By bicycle and on foot, I visited wetlands, canals, mountains, farms and neighborhood gardens. Over the course of the year, I created drawings and hand-pieced quilted textiles inspired by the Taiwanese landscape. I work with a limited palette, pattern, shape, and form, embracing evidence of the hand in the drawn mark and stitch. Using ink markers on paper, I draw on the traditions of Fauvism. Non-naturalistic color, fierce mark-making, and direct application of color create an inventive pictorial space. My depiction of places such as Lyu-Chuan Canal, Jinbaoli Trail, or Taipei Botanical Garden, are less about representation of nature, but more an emotional expression about the experience of a place.

Rachel Comminos

I translate my deep dives of self-exploration into beauty, repetition, pattern, and texture by creating tufted bursts that represent portals, blooms, open-wounds, and healing. Each of my pieces encapsulate a moment of time and a mindset; An experience abstracted with yarn, needles, and a variety of scissors over a prolonged period of time. In these abstractions, I open a wider narrative and invite my audience to relate to the familiar found within. Yarn choices your mother could have made, patterns or colors found in your favorite sweater from another decade, or maybe your grandmother’s needlework. The warmth and comfort of the materials themselves connect us to these profound moments, memories, and experiences in our lives. My current art practice connects me to my familial penchant for crafting, a now instinctual skill developed after a lifetime of making. During my artistic process is when I am able to communicate and dwell within myself. In showing these works, I am communicating, displaying, sharing pieces of me. There is no disconnect between myself and my work – I’m right here, bursting and blooming.

Raul Rene Gonzalez

While making this body of work, I spent time exploring my art book library and selected two books to use as inspiration. The books were Frank Stella: Retrospective: Works 1958 – 2012 and Neo Rauch Paintings. Within the Neo Rauch book, I found a postcard with notes I wrote during a 2013 graduate school trip to Berlin. One of the notes read: “Umspringen – changing into something else”.

The discovery of the postcard led to the title for this body of work: Umspringen. It felt like confirmation that I was on the right track in leaping into something new. The postcard included other notes such as: Automatism, Schematism, physical pictorial space, and überspringen (skipping/leaping over something). While creating these paintings and drawings, I explored all the ideas written in my notes, as well as considering how Stella and Rauch each explored visual compositions.