At the GRI, Baeza has been reflecting not only on the migration of people but also objects. Having access to archives that reveal the movement of things, and how their stories change over time, has been transformative. “It’s been overwhelming, but in such a good way, because there’s just so much to look at, and it’s hard to even know where to start.” In addition to perusing the GRI’s extensive collection of artists’ books, he has explored the records of the Stendahl Art Galleries, which, in selling pre-Columbian art to Hollywood high society of the 1930s and ’40s, played a large role in how these ancient pieces assumed new meanings as they traveled across borders.
Baeza’s work has also been influenced by conversations with scholars from around the world whose research similarly addresses questions of mobility and belonging. What happens to objects once they are sealed in the museum for display and placed alongside other disparate works from around the world? What is the museum’s responsibility to these things? As with many human beings, Baeza points out, these items have often been forced to migrate from their original homes.
What Baeza desires most in his art making is to find freedom, he says. In his work, bodies often float against washes of deep red, dark gray, and midnight blue. In their monochrome color the figures can be difficult to discern, but with careful viewing, they reveal themselves slowly, before receding back into the darkness. To be a migrant or a queer person—identities pushed to the margins of society—is to exist in this floating world, a “mode of suspension,” as he puts it. But at the same time, this can be a space of freedom. He doesn’t want to romanticize these ways of living, he says, “but in that mode, there’s also the possibility to thrive.”
It is in the studio—drawing, carving, sanding, and cutting out scraps to assemble fantastical new landscapes from the fragments of the old—that Baeza experiences this potential. Each day feels like a venture into the unknown. “My practice leads to more questions than answers,” he says. When he’s blocked, he draws or collages, often with no intention to create artwork to exhibit. “It’s about protecting that joy,” he says.
He keeps the scraps created through the process of collage, never knowing how these fragments might find a place in future projects. “I like having the possibility that the work is giving life to other work.” Collage, after all, is a technique often applied in the aftermath of destruction, from world war to the Watts Rebellion, as a way of putting the pieces back together, not as they were before, but in cracked, beautiful new forms.
For Baeza, creativity is a life-giving force. “What’s been fruitful is thinking about the ways that people have survived in those situations, and in those suspensions,” he says. “For me, that survival has been through the imagination.”
