Lisa Baird

I approach art as an investigation, a way of understanding and as salvation. My work is concerned with identity and self-knowledge as woman, mother and artist. Originally a painter, my imagery drew upon my domestic environment. Years later, I entered graduate school and began experimenting with the idea of a walk-in environment to enhance the reality of the painted experience.

The "Wedding Reception" incorporates assemblage figurative sculpture, lighting and video in an attempt to articulate the ambiguities of our time. The figures in the installation are imprisoned in the plaster or wood, and confined by the everyday utilitarian objects that make up their lives. In some of the figures there is a small, strategically placed video monitor which assumes the character of a secondary reality. The videos also act as a family album, containing not only the joy of remembered family events and rites of passage but also the sadness of difficult and unsuccessful relationships. In a selected video monitor, the viewer is herself filmed so that she becomes implicated with the work of art. We can no longer perceive if we imitate or are being imitated; we lose sense of what is "real."