Yielding Epicenter
Photo by Felicia Glidden.
The work in this exhibition combines delicate steel forms, inspired by the graceful structures found within airships, with patterns generated by the app, Kaleidomatic, printed on fabric. Amidst these designs are subtle references to the haunting imagery of the twisted girders of the Hindenburg disaster of 1937.
When displaying an extracted essence of these such notable icons as a classic Maybach car, an Airbus plane, ladders used to work on airships, and a Waymo self-driving car, Baker calls to the select few who could identify these solely based on a fragment. The use of this fragmentation further stresses the dichotomy between the handmade and the computer-aided. She connects viewers to the places and people who produce materials that enhance our lives.
Baker pays homage to the spirit of innovation that defined Friedrichshafen’s industrial past while critiquing the American delusionism that led to Zeppelin docking stations mounted atop every hotel looking to gain publicity (even if the idea was incredibly unfeasible) or compete with other buildings striving to be the tallest. She prompts reflection on the implications of emerging technologies, such as self-driving cars and AI, cautioning viewers to consider the delicate balance between progress and recklessness. Baker wants to honor the industrial past while also actively questioning its future. At its core, the goal of this body of work is to evoke a similar feeling one might experience while watching a Ferris wheel being assembled: awe for the engineering feat and scale, and a sense of foreboding about how quickly it came together.
Essay by Angela d’Avignon.
Perhaps the most delicate and ubiquitous tool of the industrial era was the ladder. The artist Emily Baker fabricated the work for the entire exhibition of Yielding Epicenter while wearing a sling after a ladder slipped out from under her, fracturing her humorous bone at the shoulder. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, workers scaled ladders hundreds of feet tall to work on the canvas-encased skeleton of dirigibles. Workers’ compensation and safety regulations had yet to exist. The work included in Yielding Epicenter was influenced by the industrial past of Friedrichshafen, Germany, a parochial town of fields and warehouse hangars, a place where a different history almost happened, a company town for a future of Zeppelins that never crowded air traffic. In Baker’s Lock Your Wheels (2024), Baker painstakingly built small replicas of tall ladders with thin steel rod, evoking the precarity of industrial work in this era.
Outmoded technology creates ghost infrastructures, like the unused spire atop the Empire State Building, a mooring mast originally built to dock airships like Zeppelins. Old tech languishes in the built environment like secrets, despite their disuse, their chemical impact lasting longer than any potential future. Technologies like those of the Zeppelin—ones that propose a future where life is easier, then fail or fade—are the subject of Baker’s interest and impetus. Her work reimagines the history of labor and reconsiders the physical body in the production of new technologies. Her exhibition is site-specific—the town that birthed Maybach also houses enormous hangars so large that fog gathers at the top of them. Baker’s scale transforms the gallery at ProjekTraum FN to mimic the size of one of those hangars—delicate steel rods draw the viewer back to the human body in reference to the cosmic scope of history itself.
Baker created a motif based on visual elements from the Hindenburg design, Maybach insignia, and other ephemera from the era, and used AI to produce kaleidoscopic patterns printed on fabric. These cloths were used in Cascade (A Gentle Landing) (2024), in which Baker first made four full circles and then serendipitously trimmed them to size on the day of the solar eclipse. This subtractive process echoed the way in which fabric lessens across the wall and represents a freeze frame of the Hindenburg on the way down, a rare aligned detail of her own labor. The repetition of labor’s choreography is made visible in her patterning. In a revisionist imagining of the famed Zeppelin’s fate, the gentle swooping motion of her fabric alludes to a Zeppelin drifting, rather than crashing, back to Earth.
Baker turns her eye to the world that capitalists yearned to bring about, one the workers of Friedrichshafen toiled to create. In Allure, (2024), a wire-frame Zeppelin floats just off the wall, affixed with a banner of Baker’s fabric dangling beneath. In 1931, the Empire State Building implemented at least one delivery by blimp: a stack of the day’s newspapers held aloft by rope and released by the brave cut of a worker’s knife. His Mooring Mast: Erected (2024) features another rigid steel form of the Empire State Building and depending on where the viewer stands, it aligns with the Zeppelin, recreating the docking that never happened.
After the Hindenburg exploded, people ran to steal materials as souvenirs. Visits to the air field resulted in bits and bots of history that ended up in museums: a steel pulley, small swaths of doped fabric from the body of the balloon, a strut and metal framework that looks like an MC Escher sketch of ladders eternally turning to the sky, towards a promise of a convoluted future.
So where did the metal from the Hindenburg go? Some said it was delivered to a junkyard in New Jersey where pieces sold for tens of thousands of dollars as trinkets, yet it ultimately remains a mystery. After an investigation into the disaster commenced, it is said the metal was shipped back to Germany to be recycled. Others said it was melted down in Chicago. In Baker’s research, she found anecdotes that traced the potential lineage of the Hindenburg scrap metal with further rumors: apparently a foundry near Cincinnati got ahold of it but instead of melting it, they sold some of it as souvenirs.
Baker is a collector herself. She currently holds the largest archive of photographs, negatives, and microphotographs of stainless steel from the former site of the Allegheny-Ludlum Technologies Steel Corporation, enough to fill three tall filing cabinets. Chasing down the death of old technology like a Zeppelin is how Baker pursues her research, rung by rung, imbuing her sculptures with echoes and hints of history that runs in both directions—to the past for insight and to the frayed parallel universes the notion of the future inspires.
As an artist with an eye for details, Baker turns to the delicate objects that appointed the Hindenburg as luxury first class travel. In Souvenir Material (2024), the artist pulled an insignia from the Hindenburg’s silverware design, a line drawing of a Zeppelin floats past an inscribed globe with the initials DZR, for Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei, a company that operated commercial passenger air flight. An intricate steel armature supports an aluminum ingot with a milled-out platform, painted with Dykem Steel Blue layout fluid. A deep indigo blue contrasts the engraved insignia.
The future of labor hangs in the balance as Artificial Intelligence (AI) engines roar to life while tech CEOs imagine new futures for workers who simply cannot afford to stop working. Technology itself is not the complete answer, especially when it uses the workers’ body to answer its questions, however collaborative. In looking to and honoring Friedrichshafen’s industrial past, Baker questions the future technology has promised us by looking into the finer details generated by decades of waste and scrap metal. Here, the artist has excavated parallel layers of history and lineage of workers’ contributions, and holds them up to the disorienting glare of the future.
Photo by Juan Fernando.
As Baker works intuitively to create sculptural objects, so do workers build, uncertain of what lies ahead.