Arizona artist Kristin Bauer creates text-based artworks that explore the ways words and images influence our perspectives and interpretations of interior and exterior spaces.
Alternative facts. The big lie. Fake news. They’re all markers of the American zeitgeist, as propaganda continues its march out of the shadows. For years, multimedia artist and writer Kristin Bauer has been exploring language, communication, and propaganda. Now her work, and the questions it raises, take on new urgency.
Based in Tempe, Arizona, Bauer uses sculpture, installation, and paintings to prompt consideration of the roles words and images play in creating, driving, embracing, and amplifying ideologies and actions—including those that impact the ability of individuals and communities to breathe freely, both in a literal and figurative sense.
During a year heavily influenced by the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic, several of Bauer’s installations created spaces for community members to breathe, even as other public work called out the patriarchy and white supremacy that prevents so many from breathing fully and freely.
In 2020, for example, Bauer created a series of text interventions for the storefronts of Phoenix women-owned creative spaces, and two text installations comprising her Untitled Gestures exhibition at Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, which continues through October 17, 2021.
An exterior piece at SMoCA reads “and a shared longing connects us.” An interior piece reads “across an ever-shifting terrain.” All were created in response to “the emotional and psychological toll of the pandemic.” All convey a sense of hope and shared community.
O’Connell, 2020. Collection of Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.
Photo: Grey Shed Studio. Courtesy the artist.
By contrast, her 2021 Dia/Chronic banner installation at ASU Art Museum sets a darker tone, reflecting “the way language and meaning evolve, with a focus on the history of propaganda.” Here she’s taken “we have seen the enemy and he is us,” a phrase that appeared on the first Earth Day poster, and layered it with “we have seen the enemy and she is us,” an approach that calls to mind the perils of binary thinking.
According to her formal artist statement, Bauer “pursues a long-form aesthetic exploration of communication, influence, and collective ideological movement.” She’s worked with varying degrees of symbolism and abstraction to consider the ways human beings make meaning amid the shifting landscape of visual culture, where perspectives are always impacted by personal and societal context.
The statement also affirms Bauer’s “focus on deconstructing formal visual and written editing practices” and her “cross-disciplinary devotion to prompting introspection and dialogue.” Tattered books strewn across a long table in her studio (with topics that include film, the poetics of space, choreography, and the formation of the Soviet Union) hint at her facility with interweaving a broad swath of historical and academic material.
“I like using banal materials that aren’t usually looked at for their aesthetic appeal,” Bauer explains. “I like to push the polarities of making them beautiful and bringing out a bit of the darkness.”
Born in Minnesota, Bauer earned her BFA at Arizona State University in 2004 and her MA at Ottawa University in 2010. Early on, she did primarily paintings and other works rooted in autobiography. Detailed studies in art therapy and psychology prompted a shift in focus to the ways text and image impact how people interpret their own experiences and their environment. Bauer did some of her earliest text interventions at her Tempe home, using spaces from interior walls to the street-facing side of her garage door.
Bauer first showed text-based work at Eye Lounge, an artist-run gallery space in Phoenix’s Roosevelt Row, where she’s one of more than 150 artists on the impressive alumni roster. In 2012, she was one of seven Arizona artists to receive a prestigious artist grant from Phoenix Art Museum’s Contemporary Forum. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, including the 2015 Transborder Biennial in Mexico and the U.S.
Typically she uses all capital letters in her work, favoring one particular font. In a 2020 interview with Steve Goldstein for KJZZ, Bauer explained that she prefers a font called Impact, which is prevalent in contemporary meme culture. At times her text and imagery are crisp and clear, other times they’re collapsed or obscured.
During the course of her career, Bauer has worked with a variety of materials. For many years, she created plexiglass cubes or panels, often stacking or arranging them to play off one another. Sometimes she layers two-dimensional plexiglass pieces mounted on floating shelves. Bauer says she enjoys working with translucent materials and mirrors in part because they bring in their surroundings, adding more layers of meaning and poetics.
In recent years, she’s been working with feather flags, a vertical marker used in outdoor advertising, as well as strips of fabric she works on a sewing machine inside the studio space she shares with fellow artist and husband Emmett Potter. “I borrow from the methods of manufacturing and subvert them,” she says, offering the example of banners and flags she imbues with sculptural properties.
“I like using banal materials that aren’t usually looked at for their aesthetic appeal,” Bauer explains. “I like to push the polarities of making them beautiful and bringing out a bit of the darkness.”
Like many artists, Bauer says her practice has been heavily influenced by the isolation of pandemic life.
“A lot of the work has not had my hand in it, intentionally, for so long,” she says. “That’s natural when you’re working with things that take place in a void, but when you’re in the middle of something and it’s happening in a rapidly shifting context, turning the lens inward is unavoidable.” Several plexiglass pieces made during the pandemic reference full-length mirrors. Propped against a wall in her studio, one reads “time will tell” in large white letters.
Although some pieces reference what’s happening in the political world and what that means on a personal level, Bauer’s work isn’t intended to be didactic. “My work reflects the energies that are out there,” she says. “I don’t focus on any particular political figure or issue; I like to look at the interrelation.”
Bauer cites a diverse range of source material such as foundational social psychology, classical Greek culture, and her own poetry. Books stacked near her laptop computer include titles by Noam Chomsky, Allen Ginsberg, Audre Lorde, George Orwell, and Andre Perry. “I could use a line from a Patti Smith poem or a Stalin speech,” she says. “There’s an architecture to the letters when I strip them down.”
For the 2019 group exhibition In, On & Of Paper at Bentley Gallery in Phoenix, she showed Colossus, a laser-cut Tyvek work reading “In a moment of sink or swim,” which flowed vertically downward and spilled onto the floor. For some, it likely called to mind the famed Colossus of Rhodes sculpture considered one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. But the intrigue inherent in Bauer’s work is the difficulty of pinning down exactly what she might be referencing at any given moment, which leaves viewers to construct their own associations and play with fresh interpretations.
Bauer also culls from family history and lore, including the German heritage that helps to explain her fondness for the Bauhaus aesthetic, reflected in her frequent use of the colors blue, red, and yellow. “I’m very influenced by mid-century print and design principles,” she says. Bauer draws extensively from silent films, taking photographs as she watches them, then playing with the imagery. “I source a lot of things online in the public domain.”
But the intrigue inherent in Bauer’s work is the difficulty of pinning down exactly what she might be referencing at any given moment, which leaves viewers to construct their own associations and play with fresh interpretations.
From board rooms to festivals, Bauer’s work has been shown in myriad settings. Mesa Contemporary Art Museum in Arizona commissioned text interventions for two bathrooms, plus a board room where the door has text reading “from a different vantage point the glass ceiling becomes a floor.” For Cautionary Tale (We Looked), text on a full-length mirror in the men’s room reads “and we looked and we looked but we could not see,” a phrase rich with wry humor and implied social commentary.
For In Flux, an Arizona multi-municipality public art project, she created a piece called Seen, which coupled an adapted still image for the star of a 1918 silent film with art deco design and text reading “look up and see me” on a commercial building in downtown Tempe. For Bauer, it was a way to explore the “cultural and individual search for visibility.”
In 2013, Bauer and Potter painted a collaborative mural across a cinderblock wall spanning more than forty feet, where the phrase “meet me in the middle” was set between vintage-style images of a man and a woman appearing to talk by telephone. In 2019, Bauer worked with Phoenix Art Museum to create a maypole-inspired interactive text-based installation for the Form Festival at Arcosanti.
Currently, Bauer is working on a four-part land activation titled Reinventing the Wheel, which is being realized on different solstice and equinox dates. With this work, she’ll bring various approaches to “deconstructing White mythologies.” She’s also in the final stages of working on a book that will document and explore a portion of her work, which is scheduled to be released in September of 2022.
Her growing exhibition history is evidence of Bauer’s comprehensive body of work, the ways her creative practice continues to evolve, and her gift for creating space where others can construct, find, and shift their own meanings.
