Dreams & Disasters

In his efforts to accrete images from constituent parts, Bailin adopts a multiplicity of implements, yielding various textures and marks. His works skirt the edge of abstraction and approach drawing as text, and as theater, rich in surface and movement

— Christopher Michno • Exhibition Review • art ltd, 2014

Dreams & Disasters

Statement

I explored in C the contrast between the rational geometry and clean surfaces of the cubicle and the chaos and disorder created by circumstances beyond one’s control. If that series was inspired by any experience it was the years I supported myself as a part-time, full-charge bookkeeper in New York City. I handled the books of two small midtown businesses. I would arrive in the morning, get a cup of coffee, settle into my closet office, spread out the accounting book, and sort the receipts and bills. All day I entered numbers into the ledger, reconciled the bank statements, paid the bills, wrote out deposits for the bank, and prepared a summary of the accounts. As a job for an artist it was great. Everything was in past tense and everything balanced to zero. And zero was what I brought into the studio from my day’s work. That is, unless the ledger didn’t balance. Then the gentle dull routine of my day turned into a snarled and agitated scuffle as I poured over the bills, receipts and columns of numbers to find the missing pennies. That was the cubicle─a mindless routine interrupted by the crisis of minutia.

But over the years I forgot that during those hours of dull routine I dreamt ─I drew in my head the next painting, thought out a piece of theater business, experienced fragments of images and spoken lines. For me, those formless and fragmented daydreams that emerged between the debits and credits were more real and certainly more important than the ledger I worked over. And while the bookkeeping set the pace and place of my routine, those activities are now forgotten. My dreams in the cubicle, however, remain─timeless and placeless, exposed and personal and emerging in this series.

Dreams and Disasters is an extension of the C series─it is the dream of the cubicle.

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