Baker Cahill’s Manifestos consists of a series of 12″ x 9″ drawings installed in a single, horizontal, cinescopic sequence. Each is intended as a “freeze-frame,” an energetic moment articulated in a split second. The reference to video is conscious; Baker Cahill is currently working with Virtual Reality technology to amplify and further animate the empathic effect of her drawings in 360 degrees.

Baker Cahill’s work interprets the human body as a complicated abstraction engaged in a perpetual struggle: corporeally real, yet unknowable. Nothing appears whole as she mines the tension between extremes of mass and void, stasis and motion, erotic and asexual forms. Her intention is for viewers to experience self-reflection as they consider their bodies and the bodies of others as engaged in an ongoing, unsettled contest— filled with vulnerability, strength, discomfort, and defiance. She aims to dissect notions of power moving over and through the body, while embracing their intrinsic mutability.

Baker Cahill recently had a solo exhibition of large scale works, Interruptions, at Moorpark College’s Art Gallery in Moorpark, CA and was the subject of art critic and historian Gracie Linden’s essay, “Surds and Manifestos: The Drawings of Nancy Baker Cahill, Peripheral Vision Arts, October 10, 2016.