IAIN BAXTER&
— The Arts Club, London 29 April — 14 September 2019

Prolific Canadian artist IAIN BAXTER& is widely regarded as a pioneering figure in conceptual art. Through his multi-disciplinary work, BAXTER& questions the ways in which we accept and process information. This exhibition will show works from the artist’s Reflected San Francisco Beauty Spots alongside his celebrated Road Trip works. 

Through a career spanning over half a century, BAXTER&’s works represent the stresses of an information-driven society, which he portrays through skewed and distorted images of his surroundings. BAXTER& has dedicated his craft to the exploration of identity and environment, and created the term “Infoscape” to describe his perspective of seeing the landscape as a signifier for humanity, through our built environments and methods of communication. 

The artist took notable inspiration from Marshall McLuhan, a renowned Canadian media philosopher through the 1960s and 1970s, whose teachings on the influence of media and information, namely his belief of “the medium is the message” were integral to BAXTER&’s practice. 

These philosophies are evident in the artist’s Reflected San Francisco Beauty Spots, a collection of photographs depicting famous landmarks in San Francisco reflected in a mirrored dish, which layers the image and confuses the viewer’s point of perspective. Shown alongside this series will be BAXTER&’s renowned Road Trip photographs, images of the North American landscape through the window of a moving car, which are illuminated on a medical light-box. These photographs present a bluntly honest view of a landscape which, until this point, had been romanticised by the media ideals of the ‘great outdoors’.

IAIN BAXTER& (born Iain Baxter in 1936) is a Canadian conceptual artist who graduated from the University of Idaho in Zoology, later going on to complete a Master’s degree in Education and Fine Arts from Washington State University in 1964. He was the subject of a solo exhibition at Hales Gallery, London (2018) and his works have been widely exhibited at  institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Jewish Museum, NY, Museum of Modern Art, NY and the Kunstmuseum, Basel and form part of the permanent collection in the Museum of Modern Art, NY, Tate Modern, National Gallery of Canada and Gemeentemuseum, among many others. BAXTER& has been awarded the Canada Council for Arts Molson Prize and The Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

The exhibition is curated by Amelie von Wedel and Pernilla Holmes of Wedel Art.