Jamie Baldridge

Life and work

Jamie Baldridge was born in New Iberia, Louisiana on May 24, 1975. He was raised in a very conservative, strict, and traditional Creole Catholic household in the southernmost part of Louisiana. He decided to become an artist at an early age after discovering a picture book entitled 101 Fairy Tales while rummaging through his grandmother's attic. The colourful and fantastic images in the book captured his imagination and engendered in him the desire to re-create the same feeling of wonder in others. He went on to study creative writing, theology, and fine art photography at Louisiana State University where he received both his Bachelor of Fine Art and later his Master of Fine Art degrees. He is currently a professor of fine art at the University of Louisiana.

He is known for creating highly manipulated surreal tableau vivant photographs. Baldridge's work references many literary, philosophical, religious, and artistic themes such as the symbolism and psychology of dream imagery, the frangibility of relationships, altered states of consciousness, Jungian archetypes, and esoteric tales and fables. "He has filtered those loaded fables through his subconscious, tempered them with dystopia, tasty fetishes and research gleaned from the musty stacks of Latin scholarship, and emerged with (a) painterly surrealistic vision." He cites Leonora Carrington, Søren Kierkegaard, Joseph Campbell, Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso, Remedios Varo, Edward Gorey, and the Epic of Gilgamesh as but a few of his varied inspirations. His subjects, usually female, often have their faces and/or heads obscured allowing the viewer greater opportunity for symbolic interpretations of identity and challenging accepted preconceptions about the genre of portraiture. Baldridge's works are often accompanied by narratives written in a very purple and baroque prose which serve to describe the point of peripety represented in the image itself.

Publications

Solo exhibitions

Two person exhibitions

Selected group exhibitions