SPOOKY ART AT A DISTANCE: THE MICRO- AND MACRO-IMAGERY OF VIRGINIA BAICH

By Peter Frank

In an era as fraught as ours, it is easy to miss those phenomena that take us away from our species pain and folly.

Among the deluge of gruesome, predictable pictures, however, lurk many breathtaking images that have nothing to do with humankind. Actually, they could indeed impact us. That virus, that errant asteroid, and there are many practical reasons for scouring the heavens and peering into the molecular and even sub-atomic levels.

But, invariably, the pictures we capture of microbes and macrobes, of galaxies and bacterial colonies being rent asunder, fascinate us simply for their awe-inspiring gorgeousness.

Aesthetics run rampant throughout the universe; we just have to seize the moments those bursts of beauty come to us. In this respect, Virginia Baich has gone out on a limb. She has committed her entire practice to the search for the scientific marvelous - a search powered in part by the poetry of astronomical and nanobiological forms, of course, but also by the concepts these apparitions betray.

Scientists are the first to come under their thrall, not only because they are the first to discover these swoonworthy visions, but because they look at these images and read them like some extra- or infra-terrestrial calligraphy had come into focus. Then the rest of us, including artists, get to get high off them.

Baich, however, wants to get close, scientifically close, to them, close enough to be able to read or at least taste the ideas "written" in the lenses of machines turned skyward or turned toward a smeared slide. And if that means incorporating the mundane calculus that provides our scientists with their only lingua franca into her own notational notions, Baich does so, rendering her sense of quantum mechanics, for instance, as a double figuration: the figures of the math and the figural-as-representational painting she makes out of galaxies and atoms alike.

Baich, then, is at once a conceptual artist, an abstract painter, and a realist (well, naturalist) of sorts. What you see is anything but what you see, but what you see - what Baich shows you - is as big and full and glorious as forever. Baich's universe is the sum of its parts, and there are too many parts to comprehend a whole - but there are also enough to comprehend a theory of a whole, a space-echo that binds protozoan to planetary motion.

Is Baich looking for a "theory of everything? Does string theory leave us only enough rope to hang ourselves, or does it bind the reach of known (and unknown) distance? It does what it does, it works as it works, and at least it holds the door open for a yet more intricate yet more logical proposition. Virginia Baich is at that door, awaiting and anticipating the next visual, and extra-visual, revelation. Los Angeles September 2024