27 April–3 June, 2000

Iain Baxter, a significant figure in the North American art scene in the late sixties and early seventies, began his practice in the early sixties and continues to make important work today. Interested in the abstraction of ideas and process, Baxter worked toward encompassing life into art and visa versa. This culminated in the N.E. THING CO. — an “idea” business in which Iain Baxter was co-president with his wife Ingrid Baxter. The 1965 vacuum forms seen in this exhibition mark Baxter's emergence into the realms of pop and conceptual practices. The bas-reliefs made out of colored molded plastic take as their subject matter landscapes and still lives which use banal everyday objects such as bleach bottles, food items and tools.

In his celebration of the ordinary Baxter seeks to highlight the common object and experience, contemporizing the subject matter (landscape and still life) through the use of industrial plastic as an artistic medium. The plastic's duplicity, in its beauty and cheapness, made it an apt contemporary medium in which Baxter could reconsider traditional artistic subject matter. While the plastic appears base and the subject matter routine, the deceptively fresh straightforward appearance of these works gives rise to a discussion of commodity.

Baxter's concern with issues of display is seen here in the incipient stages of his practice, where vacuum formed bottles, jugs and other commodities are lined up as if on a supermarket shelf. The works themselves play with seriality, calling into question the uniqueness of each object cast in a vacuum form as well as the individual nature of each work themselves.