Felipe Baeza

b. 1987, Guanajuanto, Mexico
Lives in New Haven Connecticut and New York

Venue

Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans
900 Camp Street, New Orleans, LA 70130
Monday, 11 AM–5 PM
Tuesday, Closed
Wednesday–Sunday, 11 AM–5 PM

neighborhood

Downtown/Central Business District (CBD)

About the project

Using collage and décollage, processes that involve adding and removing materials, as well as printmaking techniques, Felipe Baeza’s multimedia works on paper explore the adaptive, resilient nature of the body in peril. Celebrating the beauty of the fugitive figure, El eco de una ruptura fugitive (The echo of a fugitive rupture, 2020) features compositions populated by fragmented, dismantled body parts that sprout vegetation from their severed limbs. The figure’s dismemberment signifies the trauma of past violence and separation. These sites of rupture and mourning, however, also represent fertile soil for growth from which new, fortified life blooms. Informed by his own experience with displacement and immigration, Baeza’s focus on physical transformation and regeneration works to affirm the histories of marginalized and persecuted peoples.

In conversation with Laura Aguilar’s photographs featured on the adjacent wall, Baeza’s works visualize imagined bodies inhabited by and transmogrifying into nature, while Aguilar utilized her own body to inhabit and pay homage to the natural world. Both pull inspiration from the body’s connection to the environment to speak to histories within queer Latinx communities. Baeza merges the corporeal and the botanical in a fantastical fashion to allude to alternative futures born from, and not limited by, past trauma.

About the artist

Felipe Baeza is a painter and printmaker whose work, primarily focused on the intersection of fugitive bodies with natural environments, seeks to situate the individual within the social and historical context of cultural practices. Baeza’s Mexican heritage informs his work through metaphor, allowing him to transform memories and history and transport viewers through past experiences, both real and imagined. His recent exhibitions include Through the Flesh to Elsewhere, the Mistake Room, Los Angeles (2020); NXTHVN: First Year Fellows, Tilton Gallery, New York (2019–20); and Felipe Baeza, Maureen Paley, London (2018). He earned a BFA from Cooper Union, New York (2009), and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut (2018).

Felipe Baeza, 2021. Installation view: Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow, 2021–22. Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Courtesy Prospect New Orleans. Photo: Alex Marks