ANIMISM TO ABSTRACTION
THIS IS NOW
LIMA PERU 2023
Animism to Abstraction
Now Gallery, Lima
In Animism to Abstraction, Sol Bailey Barker unfolds a temporal ecology where cosmology, ritual, and abstraction intersect across deep time. The exhibition navigates a universe not governed by linear chronology, but by simultaneity the box universe theory suggesting that every moment exists at once, collapsed into a perpetual now.
Time here is not a line, but a spiral. The ancestral mushroom, the first carved stone, the echo of a ritual long forgotten, and a voyager suspended in orbit each emerge as actors in a shared continuum, enfolded within a single field of vision.
At the exhibition’s core is a conceptual oscillation between animism and abstraction: the world seen not as inert matter but as animate, intelligent, and alive. Through this lens, Bailey Barker offers a meditation on consciousness, individual, planetary, and cosmic. His sculptural language gathers the symbolic detritus of civilization, tools, bones, geometries, and mythologies and reconfigures them as portals.
Abstraction, in this context, is neither reduction nor erasure, but a return to essence. A way of listening. A way of speaking to forces that exceed the human.
Sacred sites are conjured here not as destinations, but as durational spaces resonant ground where time folds and futures are remembered. Bailey Barker’s works occupy this terrain of ancient futurism, where past technologies and speculative cosmologies coalesce. His use of archetypal forms suggests an ongoing search for meaning in the debris of modernity.
These are not objects, but invitations. Animistic. Alchemical. Activated.
Power, in Animism to Abstraction, is not an instrument of dominance it is a relational field. The work asks what it means to consecrate, to imbue, to believe. What happens when we treat form not as a function of history, but as a conduit for energy?
In a world teetering between extinction and transformation, Animism to Abstraction offers a quiet, urgent proposition: that we might, through deep seeing and radical remembering, begin to inhabit time differently.