09.29.2018 | 11.24.2018
THINGS I’VE FORGOTTEN | CINDY BAKER
Cindy Baker’s Things I’ve Forgotten explores the relationship between trauma, memory, and the body. This multi-part project is based on a very specific, mostly-forgotten memory, where the artist is three years old, riding her Big Wheel tricycle, and abducted by two young boys. Though this event is indelibly marked in Baker’s memory, she has no recollection of what followed after the boys’ initial taunts. Things I’ve Forgotten examines the tension between the ability of our brains to block out traumatic events from conscious memory, but their inability to prevent those events from impacting us into adulthood.
Two commercial LED signs display running text describe the artist’s vivid dreams, written down in the night. Because she forgets most of her dreams soon after recording them, revisiting them is a parallel experience to remembering a long-forgotten memory. An audio recording of Baker reading these dream descriptions is activated when she pedals an adult-sized Big Wheel tricycle along the pathways of Galt Gardens, as part of three scheduled performances on September 29, October 6, and October 13, 2018.
Cindy Baker is an interdisciplinary and performance artist whose work is informed by a fierce commitment to ethical community engagement and critical social inquiry. Drawing from queer theory, gender culture, fat activism, and art theory, Baker’s research-based practice moves fluently between the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Cindy Baker completed her MFA at the University of Lethbridge in 2014, and she currently divides her time between Lethbridge and Edmonton.
The 2018 Into the Streets: Festival Art Series is organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and guest-curated by Jane Edmundson and Tyler Stewart. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge, and the City of Lethbridge Public Art Small Projects Program.
Cindy Baker, Crash Pad, performance documentation, 2018. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Harnett.
Documentation photography courtesy of Jaime Vedres, 2018.
