CREIGHTON BAXTER
Riddle
APRIL 12, – May 30, 2025
OPENING RECEPTION: 6–8 PM, SATURDAY, APRIL 12, 2025
PERFORMANCE: 730 PM, APRIL 16, 2025
“Drawing has always seemed to me the proof of maximal concentration through which the most subjective intelligence, the most intense abstraction, makes something exterior visible and suddenly perceptible to the artist and nevertheless so intimately connected to the viewer that it registers, equally absolute and singular, as proof. “
- Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head
Ceradon Gallery presents Riddle, a solo exhibition by Creighton Baxter. This show brings together two distinct works: Proof, a suite of drawings exploring the layered, often contradictory meanings of their textual elements, and Yellow, an installation of hypodermic needles embedded in the gallery’s walls as colorfield abstractions.
Riddle, like the word "drawing," operates both as a noun and a verb—something that exists and something that is actively created. While the primary definition of ‘riddle’ relates to the game of deduction, its secondary definition denotes the act of being full of something (e.g. riddled with holes). Baxter embraces these dual definitions as fertile ground for exploring the spaces in-between. In the works on paper of Proof, the phrase “we will live forever” might not refer to the artist, but rather to the marks made on paper. Similarly, “fall in love at my funeral” could evoke the way a drawing’s surface is the resting place of drawing’s activity. Proof creates a paradoxical mix of slogans, directives, and prayers that resist clear interpretation, compelling viewers to find comfort in ambiguity and tension rather than resolution.
These tensions echo in Yellow, an installation of hypodermic needles whose sharp tips embed into the gallery walls, leaving only the color of each cap visible. Yellow’s needles deterritorialize the segmented spaces of the gallery, lifting the mark off the surface while embedding the medium into the walls. Each needle alone points to the penetrability of flesh, while their clustering and scattering across the gallery’s interior become amorphous colorfields–reading like swarms or celestial bodies. While Yellow’s formal interventions upon Ceradon Gallery reference the found-objects of John Boskovich, Tony Feher, and other artists who have considered the impact of AIDS on the history of post-minimalism – Yellow riddles the gallery – as a site-responsive monochrome; tracing the exhibition space’s pre-existing conditions and mechanisms of display.
Baxter’s webbing of art historical citation, her experiences as a trans woman living with HIV, and the artist’s investment in drawing, offers Riddle as a meditation on bodily autonomy and its aesthetic politics.
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Through an interdisciplinary practice rooted in drawing and performance, Creighton Baxter (b. 1990 Arizona, USA) transforms images and gestures through repetition. Her iterative bodies of work explore themes of temporality, remembrance, and the sensorium. Through disjunctive strategies, she conjures idiosyncratic visual lexicons tidally formed across various projects.
Creighton Baxter has performed at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Poetry Project, and MoMA; and participated in exhibitions at Andrew Kreps Gallery, David Castillo, and Allen Memorial Art Museum amongst others. She has contributed illustrations to The Yale Review and Duke University Press, and produced writing for Et al Projects, JB Blunk Estate, and Telematic Media Arts. Baxter received her BFA from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts and her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University.
1933 W Kingston Pl
Los Angeles, CA
Los Angeles, CA