Artist Statement

My work ranges across photography, video, performance, printmaking, drawing, installation, and sculpture. I generate systems and structures to create boundaries that permit me to constrain, contextualize, and measure elements of my life that I do not understand. Through my work, I deconstruct my position in contemporary society in order to investigate the role of the individual as it relates to agency, power, and change. Systematized acts of labor enable me to explore how the individual participates in a society whose infrastructure determines much of this individual’s participation.

My most recent work, (balancing one’s own weight in a shadow of antithetical sides), explores these questions: What happens when two antithetical systems come together to discuss the same thing? How does an individual balance both their transmission and reception of language when these two sides attempt to communicate? What does it mean to be either impartial and objective or biased and subjective? How, when, and why would one shift between these two positions? – Paul Baughman

View Paul’s website

“Paul revels in contradictions and conundrums, enlisting photography, video, sculpture, performance and rock climbing to interrogate life, artistic practice and physicality. In the exhibition, a large seesaw in raw wood foregrounds a grid of elegant, inscrutable black and white prints. In his opening night performance, Paul battled heroically to transfer a mound of wet black clay from one side of the rickety seesaw to the other. As we watched, mesmerized, a rite of both athletic grace and acute vulnerability unfolded, evoking a tantalizing hint of meaning in the space between the wall and the stained wooden apparatus.”

– Rebecca Cummins, Professor of Photo/Media 

Committee:

• Ellen Garvens (Photo/Media)
• Rebecca Cummins (Photo/Media)
• Aaron Flint Jamison (Photo/Media)
• Yoko Ott
• Tivon Rice (DXARTS)