Care for You: Anthony Baussy and Tyler Eash

About

The exhibition is accompanied by a text from Will Ballantyne-Reid.

Care for You is a duo exhibition conceived by multidisciplinary artists and partners Anthony Baussy and Tyler Eash, encompassing works formed from the numerous biographical, existential and material concepts that make up the artists’ individual practices and shared relationship. The cumulative presentation layers pieces that respond to the presence of the other in the exhibition, enacting poetic frictions through totems of selfhood, queerness, togetherness and a desire to share with audiences these illustratory constellations of love and lived experience.

Baussy’s painted plaster sculptures, forms inspired by bodhisattvas, people in the artist’s life, and Giacometti’s distant figures, emerge from both the floor and the wall. The predecessors of these pieces were formed in the traditional white of plaster casting, which dates back to the Ancient Egyptians, but Baussy has more recently begun to paint on these works in bright colours that both reflect their extensive travels and pull the pieces more distinctly into their own orbit. Eash encircles these works with site-specific interventions, building out a scenery for these characters using industrial materials, such as a ceiling support pole and car paint, in a nod to their father’s profession, alongside willow branches used in basketmaking practices reflective of the artist’s Maidu nationality and two-spirit gender.

The scene is surrounded by mixed-media wall works by both artists: the semi-translucent paintings of Baussy, formed from shellac, pigment-based ink and raw pigment, that allude to the ephemerality and glitches of collective, eternal and subjective memory; and the bulging, iridescent curvatures of Eash’s textile paintings, which here incorporate clothing shared by the artists adorned with intricate beadwork. The resultant staging interweaves varied spiritualities and worldviews grown from singular experiences.