hannah baer

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  print Summer 2023

  PROJECTIVE REALITY

  MY FRIEND BLAINE sends me the link to a website boasting a heretofore unimaginable feat: See any girl naked. The so-called deepfake generator invites you to upload any image of a clothed woman. Using AI, the program then redraws the same picture of her without clothes on. I have, in fact, already seen myself naked. Still, I’m curious. I upload a mirror selfie of myself in black Yohji pants and a sleeveless mesh top, black bra underneath. I press start. I wait.

  The image that’s revealed hits me in the gut. First of all, it’s blurred, and you have to pay to un-blur it. I am being paywalled from

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  picks October 24, 2022

  Willa Nasatir

  A stereotype about Willa Nasatir’s native Los Angeles is that it’s a city obsessed with surfaces. Yet the artist’s works are a joyful exercise in the study of a surface’s depths—its layers, transparencies, reflections, films—challenging the eye to decode form via sundry smears and shimmers. The sextet of pieces on view here—three acrylic-on-canvas paintings and a trio of photographs printed on Plexi—visually rhyme with one another, partly through a shared fascination with the manifold veneers they depict, stack, and obfuscate.

  The painting Slice (all works 2022), features the catawampus wheel of

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  print December 2021

  DANCE UNTIL THE WORLD ENDS

  IN THE SUMMER of the 2020 uprising, a friend who first brought me to some of the famous German clubs asked me what to expect at an illegal march through a large city. She was maybe nervous, and I was trying to be reassuring. I thought there were certain parts she would already understand from raving, and I began to picture a Venn diagram. Bring water. Wear black, a hoodie, sunglasses and other kinds of face coverings. Remember that it’s durational and prepare to push through exhaustion. You will see people from every part of your life. You will make new friends with people just because you saw

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  print May/June 2020

  hannah baer

  PART OF THIS MEME, like a lot of memes I make, comes from conversations I was having in my head that were echoing conversations I was having or seeing happen in the world. One thing I kept thinking and talking about is the way this crisis—especially its epidemiological component—promotes a tension between individualist and collectivist concerns. On the one hand, many of us have shrunk our cones of experience to very narrow, hyperindivudated sets of priorities: Am I practicing CDC guidelines correctly? What will I eat today? When will I run out of money? On the other, many of us are more tuned