Into the Shade 2014
Charcoal and pastel on paper, fabric dye on linen
site specific
The work presented here, part of a project called, Into the Shade, describes the way of life under the tents in the harvesting of shade tobacco and the industry itself in the Connecticut River Vally. My Grandfather, immigrating from Lithuania in the late 1800‘s, began his life in America as a tobacco farmer. Eventually he turned to dairy farming as a way of life. As a young girl, at the age of 13, I worked during the summer in the tobacco fields. This study is a story about the laborers; the local farmers and migrant workers. While coming from places with very different socioeconomic backgrounds and cultural traditions, they become a collective force under the tents and in the barns. The cultivation of premium tobacco leaves used for cigar wrappers become their shared responsibility. This narrative illustrates one of the forces that helped give rise to our industrial heritage.
Time (noun) = the past, present, and future; a particular moment; hour of the day; an opportunity; the right moment; duration; occasion. * to measure or record the duration of. (from the Webster’s New Century Dictionary)
To visually articulate time, the artist can choose to render events, objects, actions, or places. They can be relics from the past, present day occurrences, or theoretical ideas. But these subjects should include an instance of something happening or having been done. Whether it’s a whimsical dance, an iconographic artifact, or a sensuous play of light in a landscape, the work should reflect the progress of existence regarded as a whole. Like cinematic clips, the works can be mundane or sensational events, self critical exposés, or social commentary, but they must invite investigation beyond the obvious, ask us to reflect, or look to the future.
Growing up on a farm, coming of age as a designer in the textile industry, being immersed in these working cultures, has had a profound influence on my artwork. I shifted between the world of glamour and a gritty work culture, turning to the study of immigrant workers in textiles, farming and domestic servitude, as the focus of my investigations. I believe that the combination of art and history speaks to people on many levels. It generates opportunities to educate and inspire while reaching out to a broad audience. How am I a part of, and connected to, my immigrant ancestors, who came to America for a better life, and worked in the mines and on the farms so that we would have choices they only dreamt of? How are we all a part of a national story, played out in countless families of every ethnicity, color, and religion? What experiences tie us together? Can ‘place’ and ‘time’ define, describe, and unite us?
My paintings incorporate the manipulation of textiles, and provide a contemplative quality to a study of the patterns and rhythms of everyday events. Site specific installations create interactive environments with scrims, paintings, video, music and photography. Theatrical gauze, stenciled, printed with digital images, layered and undulating, direct the audience through shifting imagery and a cacophony of color, pattern, shape and texture, inviting them to become part of the work. Some works are oil on canvas viewed through intervening layers of translucent fabrics, while others use the textiles themselves as the canvas. I explore pattern and iconography and how subconscious memories affect what we see.
I want to help people understand their own roots in the industrial landscape, to be a formative influence on how the public thinks and feels about the nation’s industrial past and present. How art can explore the connection between personal experience and public memory is at the heart of my work.
-Deborah Baronas
Barrington, Rhode Island
RISD Alumni Exhibitions 