REVIEW: Lucy Wood Baird, “What do I call you?” at Material Exhibitions
Lucy Wood Baird, What do I Call You, installation view, photo by Lucy Wood Baird. Image courtesy the artist and Material Exhibitions.
REVIEW
Lucy Wood Baird, What do I call you?
Material Exhibitions
2025 West Belmont Ave.
Chicago IL 60618
Apr 11- May 5, 2025
By Anneliese Hardman
Photography has long been thought of as a definitive source for truth and documentation. Lucy Wood Baird’s solo exhibition of mixed media works, entitled What do I call you? challenges this notion by considering photography’s fickle and slippery nature. The show’s title catalyzes questions like: How should Baird’s multi-dimensional and multi-temporal mixed media works be understood and engaged with? Are Baird’s sculptures actual stone or just images of stone? Where did the photographs that make up these stone replicas come from? And, who took these photographs and why?1
What do I call you? comprises five works (available for sale through Material Exhibitions for the duration of the show) fabricated by collecting images of marble and stone from various sources. The images are transferred into a manipulatable digital image that is later printed and superimposed onto plexiglass and other layerable platforms. Collaged images are then constructed into tabletop models. These maquettes are then scaled up into the form of mixed media sculptures which combine photography, stone, mirror paper, and plexiglass sheets.
Each work references the others also included in the show through the repetition of unspecified marble and stone materials. For example, Baird’s works titled, Wraith (2025), hangs on the far-left wall directly across from a second work titled, Bookmatch (2025).2 Both incorporate a pink and russet colored pattern with deep purple veining. Similarly, Baird’s Twin Stranger (2025) is displayed on the back wall of the space across from another work titled, Shapeshifter (2025). These works integrate pigmented prints that fade from black to lighter shades of blues, grays and whites. The prints also showcase a repeating matrix pattern which mimics particles of light and shadows. Shapeshifter and Weighted Likeness (2025) share formal qualities of inserted mirror boards and plexiglass doubles of white and black marble with golden brown veining. Reiterations of materiality and formal qualities of color create a cohesion amongst Baird’s works that efficiently make use of the contained front room of Material Exhibitions where the works are showcased.3
Lucy Wood Baird, What do I Call You, installation view, photo by Lucy Wood Baird. Image courtesy the artist and Material Exhibitions.
Materiality is also used by Baird to comment about the opaqueness and illegibility of truth and reality. To do this, each work’s name, including those of Shapeshifter, Twin Shadow, and Wraith connote uncanniness by invoking haunted doubles. For example, a wraith refers to the likeness of a living person that takes the form of an apparition just before death. Baird’s Wraith embodies this meaning through its perfect mimicry of crystal rose marble. The work also thwarts true replication by being made from a velvet materiality that is soft to touch and extremely lightweight compared to the cold, hard, and heavy nature of actual marble.
Lucy Wood Baird, Wraith, 2025. Pigment print, velvet pins, 27.25 x 3.57 x 55.25 in. Photo by Lucy Wood Baird. Image courtesy the artist and Material Exhibitions.
Referred to by the artist as uncanny due to Wraith’s deceptive materiality, Baird’s works also demonstrate aspects of the reverse-uncanny. This occurs when objects the viewer is familiar with, like marble, transforms into something strange. Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as “something which is secretly familiar [heimlich-heimisch], which has undergone repression and then returned from it.”4 This understanding anchors the interplay of the Heimlich (homely) and the unheimlich (uncanny, or literally unhomely).5
The familiarity of the viewer with themself and their environment is also subverted by Baird’s works. For example, Weighted Likeness comprises one piece of actual marble and two pieces of plexiglass fictive marble slabs, all which lean against a wall and stand atop a mirror board. This work is located on the floor of this artist-run space and requires the viewer to stand over it and look down. Engaging the work in this way activates it by reflecting the persona of the viewer gazing into it. Interrupting marble slabs enter the looker’s frame of vision and disrupt the viewer’s reflection. This creates an uncanny reflection of the gazed upon artwork and the gazing viewer. The viewer’s environment is also rendered uncanny. Fictive marble refers to a technique first used by the Father of the Renaissance, Giotto di Bondone (d. 1337), when painting hyper realistic versions of stone and marble sculptures in the Chapel of the Arena in Prado.6 Instead of fabricating marble likenesses out of paint, Baird generates hers through photography and printing techniques. A dramatic contrast is created between the actual slab of marble which Baird refers to as the negative, and the copies made of a marble pattern printed atop a plexiglass sheet. Irony is evoked by the fake marble slab’s translucent and transparent nature while the actual marble is opaque. This contrast symbolically insinuates the difficulty in discerning the truthfulness of a photograph.
Lucy Wood Baird, Weighted Likeness, 2025. Pigment prints, plexiglass, mirror, marble, 24 x 24 17.5 in. Photo by Lucy Wood Baird. Image courtesy the artist and Material Exhibitions.
Critical thinking about photographic truth extends beyond Baird’s work, causing viewers to consider relative truth found within the larger world. It is impossible to observe Baird’s exhibition without also witnessing the outside world through Material Exhibitions large front floor to ceiling windows. At times, natural lighting entering these windows creates a glare on the works’ mirror paper. Despite this small distraction, the viewer constantly negotiates Baird’s interior exploration of truth and what this critical examination means once leaving the space and reentering the outside world.
Of the five works exhibited at Material Exhibitions, three are installed on the floor of the space. Regardless, these works act as anchors in the exhibition, causing the visitor to contemplate the natural source of Baird’s artificial marble. Residing on the floor, the works allude to the artificiality of even the ground they rest on which at one time was covered with soil, rocks, and plants, but has since been converted into a manmade environment. Existing within a larger urban environment like Chicago, Baird’s works also insert the Deep Time of nature that exists beneath Chicago’s constructed environment. While nature might feel managed and contained, it is also ever present in the way that the ground supports the weight of the viewer, Material Exhibitions, and Baird’s works.
Anneliese Hardman is a curator, lecturer, and museum enthusiast specializing in Southeast Asian art histories. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Art History at the University of Illinois Chicago with a focus on contemporary Cambodian art. Her dissertation project explores art that reflects relational changes of Southeast Asian environments and culture. You can find her other publications on Art & Market, Orange Blossom Ordinary, and Fwd: Museum Journal.
FOOTNOTES
1 Interview with Lucy Wood Baird, April 12, 2025.
2 Wraith was originally located on the floor of the space before Baird decided to experiment with the work by placing it on the wall. Because the piece juts out from the wall, it confronts viewers and forces them to consider its repeating cartographic and topographical patterns.
3 Just the front room is dedicated to the Lucy Wood Baird solo exhibition. The back part of the space houses artist’s studios for Material Exhibitions owner Jean Alexander Frater, Nancy Wisti Grayson and Benjamin Larose.
4 Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny’ in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, (1919): 222.
5 Romita Ray, “Misty Mediations: Spectral Imaginings and the Himalayan Picturesque,” Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide 11, no. 3 (Autumn 2012): para 3. And Jemma Deer, “The Uncanny: A Step-by-Step Guide,” Oxford literary Review 42, no. 2 (2020): 180.
6 Philippe Cordez, “Les Marbres De Giotto Astrologie et Naturalism à la Chapelle Scrovegni,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 55 (2013): 9.
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