The Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College is pleased to present Trust Fall, a solo exhibition by Mara Baldwin.For her exhibition, Baldwin will install works created over the past five years across the entirety of the Handwerker Gallery.
We will host an opening reception on Thursday October 9th from 5 – 6:30 p.m. and Baldwin will offer an artist talk in the Gallery on her work on October 16th at 5:30 p.m. In addition, we will host the talk: Intrepid Girls The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA by Amy Erdman Farrell , Professor of American Studies and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Dickinson College, who will speak about her forthcoming book Intrepid Girls The Complicated History of the Girl Scouts of the USA published by The University of North Carolina Press (2025).
For her exhibition Trust Fall in the Handwerker, Baldwin draws inspiration from personal experiences as well as found archival ephemera of summer camp: candle-clad model boats constructed from twigs, knotted friendship bracelets, handmade felt banners and iconographic patches and badges. The language and tools celebrate both the tenderness and humbleness of objects of camp-culture made earnestly from limited resources. This body of work explores the individual and transformational wonder of gathering together, outdoors, learning and creating collectively, and treats its affectations as worthy of serious inquiry and critical engagement.
Mara Baldwin is an artist working with labor-intensive mark-making, textile manipulation, and sculpture to examine the roles of imagination and effort as shared, necessary tools of both the artist and the utopian. She scrambles found objects, textures, and highly rendered surfaces to create the lonely interiors and blueprints of remnant or newly imagined worlds. Baldwin's work pays attention to the historically under-recognized depth of female experience: the ghostly trace of women’s past lives, the earnestness of present-day feminism/s and queerness, and the aspirational hopefulness (and often, contradictory aims) of utopian liberation.
