Douglas Baulos
Douglas Baulos
Website: http://dougbaulos.com
Instagram: @doug_baulos
Bio: Baulos’s drawings, installations, and prints have been exhibited/published both nationally and internationally. His current works are explorations (visual) and meditations (poetry) centering on his ideas of spirituality, queer identity, death, shelter, and hope. The work he creates function as spaces that allows the viewer to be guided through a thought process as well as evoking time and journey/text and image in an intimate fashion. His objects and installations hope to explode process into an embodied visual narrative, a manifestation of our inner life.
Artist Statement: My recent work is rooted in personal curiosity about how small, specific stories from my life as a queer person in the deep south of the United States might lead to wider conversations that become large installations and cloth prints that serve as axis points of innumerable relationships.I find political agency through the use of upcycling everyday clothes and constructed objects from thrift stores/trash/foraged materials. Growing up queer, I sacrificed authenticity to minimize humiliation and prejudice. I hope to reveal which parts of my life truly depict me and which parts I create to protect myself and base my gender identity on. Although I work with emotionally heavy conceptual themes like loss, mortality, and the power and delicate nature of memory, my work is a reflection of my attempt to live my life in fragile exultation. I merge the abstraction of narrative with the physicality of objects. In my extinction projects I’m creating diorama maps where the sentient, intimate and vestigial are articulated, placing the viewer in their midst of the installation’s embodiment. There is an intimacy with the subject becoming object, with the reverence for previous lives, and the confrontation of the doggedly present body. My work is about exploring where these spaces are suspended for observation and meet at a crossroads between the temporal (fleeting) and concrete (lasting). My studio practice stems from my interest in the subliminal, unremarkable and overlooked within exquisite emotional landscapes. I express the oscillation of hope and despair while exploring the boundaries and intersections within the nature of identity. I want to create works that exude a rich aesthetic space that allows the viewer the luxury of be able to immerse themselves in cognitive experience. This idea of fragmentation as well as things left marked or scarred is reinforced through patina of worn materials, diversity of subjective textures and disjointed formal structures.