As Laura Baker-Roberts prepares to hang her artwork for her show monotypes in Lost & Found (2383 Agricola Street), her shadowy, delicately beautiful prints are scattered on the floor of the vintage clothing store. Baker-Roberts explains these monotypes—made through a form of printmaking which uses only one sheet—are actually full of spiritual and cultural significance.
While Baker-Roberts begins to set up for the exhibit, she mentions multiple times that she is prone to get tongue-tied. “Don’t leave me,” she says to Kate Walchuk, the show curator, as Walchuk walks back to the counter.
After a careful explanation about the work though, the monotypes speak for her.
The collection of thirty prints, which Baker-Roberts’ created for a final project at NSCAD University, are meant as a starting point to get her audience thinking about issues like Canadian cultural identity, spiritual identity and colonization, something Baker-Roberts feels more comfortable articulating through her artwork.
Her influences combine of her upbringing practicing Hinduism as well as her family’s loyalist Fredericton, NB history. Baker-Roberts achieves this combination through her use of photographs of Fredericton residents in the 1990s as the foundation for her prints and using gold spraypaint in a few of the prints specifically to pay homage to “Indian spiritual deities”. “I cut up and used vintage doilies that I found. I felt weird using them because they’re overused but I also used seaweed and other found objects,” says Baker-Roberts, as she sits on the floor with the prints, spreading them out. She also uses clashing colour palettes and textures, to bring out specifics of her religious and cultural background.
Despite her embarrassment at using doilies, any uptight feeling you would associate with a doily is played down by her use of striking gold paint. In one monotype specifically they work together to symbolize a Hindu god. “I wanted to approach colonialism from a spiritual point of view,” says Baker-Roberts. Even though the monotypes began as a school project, she says it grew into something else.
By bringing together the imagery of her colonial New Brunswick heritage with the imagery of her eastern religious upbringing, Baker-Roberts attempts to challenge ideas of what defines Canadian cultural identity. She shows how specifically for her, both her heritage and her religion work in conjunction to define her own identity, which she then actively expresses through her artwork.
She says it’s a debate that she always has with her friends, and Baker-Roberts seems to be seeking an answer for these issues not only through her art, but through interacting with her audience.
monotypes runs to June 5.