Selected Press
Wanderings: 2024 BFA Fine Arts Exhibition Catalogue: Bai Bautista-Buckingham
Written by Maggie Blashill
Bai Bautista-Buckingham is interested in themes of consumerism, waste, and memory. In a world that seems to become faster and faster each year, the new grabbed with both fists and the old immediately discarded, Bautista-Buckingham seeks to slow down and interact with the abandoned past. Her found object sculptures embody this desire; scraps from car wrecks, traffic cones, an old exit sign. She imbues these rejected objects with new purpose, refusing to accept them as waste or trash. In her paintings, Bautista-Buckingham is inspired by her family's vast collection of photographs. She references these half-remembered figures from her family history and incorporates them into her present, refusing to leave them behind. In her painting Ibuprophet (2023) as well as her sculpture Your So Sexy Aha... (wrong your for authenticity) (2022), Bautista-Buckingham references elements of Y2K and Internet meme culture that have become obsolete and dated but which gain new life and meaning through their placement in this body of work. She enjoys revisiting and borrowing from these aspects of her childhood because to her they are not dead. They are simply buried under a new wave of consumer culture that is just as quickly abandoned in the face of a shiny new future.
Artist Profile Series for Manifest 2024
Interview on pages 12-13
Exhibition Description for Trust Visions 2023
Bai Bautista-Buckingham and James Ross: Trust Visions - The Visualist