Peter Baker

Actual Size is pleased to present Current Treatment, artist Peter Baker’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Baker’s large scale, multi-layered photographs describe the shifting identities of the contemporary city. The socio-economics of the cityscape play out in strange and telling ways, creating disjointed relations between people their environment. In A Confrontation (Beyond Exceptional) Los Angeles, 2017, monumental animated screens and commercial architecture set the stage for an encounter between police and a defiant man. This scene of individual pathos dwarfed by hyper development is a reminder that to navigate the streets of Downtown L.A. is to partake in the grand illusion that one is moving through the public realm, when in reality entire swaths of its sidewalks and thoroughfares are privately owned. Baker’s photograph renders the duplicity of the social-landscape hiding in plain sight under the slogans of progress. This becomes fertile ground to expand on ideas of reality and fiction that inform the artist’s approach to his medium.

War Of The Worlds, New York, Los Angeles, 2016, juxtaposes staged destruction with what have become ordinary scenes of new development. The question of whether the images are straight or constructed is complicated by the fact that all of Baker’s pictures are straight photographs of projections of reality. The images exhibited comment on ideas like hyperreality and late-capitalism, however it is gesture, description and the intuitive process of picture making that is paramount to the work. With precision and nuance Baker describes what he sees as the Current Treatment of our cities, not to draw easy conclusions, but to establish a discipline of looking for new ways of posing the questions.

Born in 1981, Peter Baker is an artist/photographer from New York City. He received a BA in Literature & Photography from SUNY Purchase in 2005 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2012. He has designed and taught courses at the International Center of Photography and has been a contributing writer for American Suburb X and Der Grief. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.