Nancy Baker Cahill
[32][33][25][5] In the latter 2010s, she sought to create more immersive experiences in her "Surds," "Manifestos" and "Hollowpoint" series, which resembled twisting bodily forms or swirling storms, falling comets and teeming undergrowth.
[23] These included her VR "Hollowpoint" drawings (LACE, 2018) and her Sunset Digital Billboards project (2018), which depicted abstract towers of translucent color and jagged edges of metallic shards floating through space.
[6][13] Elvira Wilk of Frieze described these mutable and relocatable works as "a distinct counterpoint to (masculinist) land art traditions that exalt human intervention into the natural landscape.
[6][35][36] Los Angeles Times critic Christopher Knight described the latter work as a haunting, "twirling, swirling fog of phantasmagorical shards of light and shadow hovering in the sky" that evoked a star being born from a cloud of dust, a plague of locusts, or a thought forming.
[13][37][6] Stone Speaks (2022–23) similarly evoked both ecological disaster and its healing, depicting a kind of Big Bang in reverse forming into a sphere and then a verdant Earth-like planet which undergoes deterioration and then regeneration.
[41][8][42] The animation depicted a floating, shape-shifting coil of red, white and blue brushstrokes roughly approximating a swaying, abstracted Liberty Bell—accompanied by a raucous soundtrack—which built toward arrhythmic dissolution but retained cohesion.
[4][43] Artillery wrote that the "writhing, seething mess of threads" and tolling bell "embodies the turbulent political discourse of an election year and the fraying state of American democracy.
"[41] In 2023, Baker Cahill projected State Property above the U.S. Supreme Court and selected statehouses, a visceral image of a neon-red, fracturing uterus designed to address and map out the sites of the most extreme legislation restricting abortion and reproductive rights throughout the nation.
[49] New media art curator and historian Christiane Paul wrote, "By minting them as NFTs, [Baker Cahill] positions the smart contract among other kinds of contracts—social, judicial, financial—and highlights the instability of all of them.
[54][55][56] "Defining Line" was an extension of that project that activated untold sites of historical significance along the Los Angeles River involving urban redevelopment, the environment, Native histories and patterns of gentrification.
[53][8] In 2019, Baker Cahill co-curated "Battlegrounds" with Jesse Damiani, an exhibition of 31 AR works that sought to reclaim various locations in and around New Orleans, including a sugarcane plantation, gentrified neighborhoods, prisons, polluted waterways and confederate statues.
