Bailey Lohmann
Bailey Lohmann (any/all) is a multidisciplinary artist and designer, raised in Mohkinstis (aka Calgary, Treaty 7) and currently residing in Amiskwaciwâskahikan (aka Edmonton, Treaty 6). They work across several mediums including oil painting, digital art, illustration, animation, and graphic design. Their practice focuses on close-up renderings of interior spaces and everyday moments, and seeks to explore themes of translation and subjectivity. Utilizing a multimedia framework, their work discusses how information is altered by reproduction, and how seemingly mundane spaces can be transformed through replication. Bailey has had illustrations published in zines including Hungry (2022), Anyway (2021), and Coffee People (2022), as well as Sybil Journal (2023). Their information brief design project was selected to be presented at the Charter at Forty (2021), a national human rights conference. Previous exhibition experience includes The November Show (dhARTworld, 2022). Bailey currently works as a freelance graphic designer for multiple communication and publishing companies. They love writing, walking around cities, and taking blurry pictures everywhere they go.
Artist Statement
By taking a multimedia approach to creation that combines elements of painting, collage, photography, drawing, and video, I hope to analyze and dissect what it means to translate information across mediums. Drawing on small, everyday scenes from my life, I base my body of work on interior spaces, using both observational and photographic sources. Part of what fascinates me about these quiet, ordinary scenes is their implied mundanity, reinforced by their overlooked existence. By centering these intimate, commonplace moments in my work, I hope to challenge what the viewer may assume is worthy of careful observation, and what should be considered deserving of remembrance. Once this aspect of reality has been established, the piece undergoes a process involving the introduction of distorted or added elements to the original environment, as well as the reproduction and reinterpretation of the image into different forms. Because the meaning of the work places an emphasis on the change that occurs during the transfer of scenes across material, the technique of replicating (or conversely, choosing to alter) each detail is as essential to the conceptual aspect of the piece as the finished product is. By summoning familiar spaces into the realm of visual art, I question the idea of a truly objective recreation. Embracing the style of each chosen medium inherently results in unique incarnations of the original environment. I choose to celebrate the subjectivity each medium has to offer, leaning less into hyperrealism, while still aiming to honestly capture minuscule moments from life. By directing diligent concentration, and sometimes downright reverence, toward the often-unacknowledged environments around me, as well as by choosing to personalize and manipulate them by facilitating their translation, my work aims to speak as a paradoxical love letter to both raw information, and the perspectives and processes that obscure it.
GnRH I, 24×30”, Oil, 2021
Hidden Valley I, 16×8”, Oil and collage, 2022
Hidden Valley II, 16×8”, Graphite and oil, 2022
Dutch Blitz, 3532x2373px, Digital film still, 2023
Social Construct II, 24×30”, Oil, 2022
In Memoriam, 2048x1536px, Digital film still, 2021
