Amanda Baron's 'Body Doubles' closes gallery season this weekend
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
If you haven’t yet found the time to take in Amanda Baron’s “Body Doubles” at the Blyth Festival Art Gallery, this weekend is your final chance to explore her multi-media collection of post-reality artwork before it all gets packed up for its return trip to Toronto. And find the time you should! “Body Doubles” is a vivid, silly journey - half surreal dreamscape, half subconscious excavation of glittering cultural gems, and an entirely fitting conclusion to the gallery’s extended 2025 season.
The same imagery recurs in many of the works - birds, cats, eyes, flowers - tiny visual echoes that resemble the glyphs of a lost civilization, their meanings untranslatable but strangely familiar, as if drawn from our shared dreams. It’s never fully clear whether Baron is mapping an imaginary world of her own design or simply offering snapshots from an alternate dimension. Either way, the characters and symbols she reveals are captivating.
A conversation with the artist herself contains few clues as to the nuts and bolts of this oddly familiar land - Baron doesn’t feel the need to pin down the purpose of her butterflies - she is satisfied with watching them alight for a moment on the magenta hair of blue women shooting rainbows out of their many eyes. It's not so much what each piece means, but why she made it: for the pure joy of creation.
Baron’s path into art was shaped in part by her early doubts. “When I was a kid, my mom was a graphic designer. I didn’t think I was good at art at all, because I couldn’t draw like her.” She found herself spending years striving to create art that others would deem worthwhile.
During her tenure as a children’s art teacher, Baron was reminded that there are so many ways for children to lose confidence in their creative spark. “The little ones - they’re just in the moment, playing with paint. And then, when they got to 13 years old, I could start to see their inner minds just tearing them down. It was really obvious. I was always trying to catch that as soon as I saw it, because I’ve been there,” she explained. “Kids need to see different styles to know that their version of art is also valid - just because you can’t do it the same way someone else does, that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be seen. Something I would tell my students a lot is that it doesn’t have to look like mine - I hope it doesn’t! It’s your own unique expression.”
At a time when Baron was struggling to make art while bogged down in the day-to-day details of existence, a confluence of changing circumstances (including moving to a new neighbourhood), suddenly shifted her into a different creative mindset. “When a big change happens, you can’t really go back to where you were,” she pointed out. “This is all sort of just my brain returning to its natural habitat.” She found herself creating the works that would become “Body Doubles” with no particular plan in mind. “It was low pressure - I didn’t think any of this would be, like, seen,” Baron admitted to The Citizen.
That openness to exploration is evident throughout the exhibit. The bright colours and bold shapes of Baron’s work tends to catch the eye at first, but it’s all the odd little details that keep you looking. At first glance, the drawings and textile works seem playful, but upon closer inspection they reveal something even more playful and mysterious. The longer you look, the more you begin to notice the clues.
Baron’s work is infused with a quiet humour and emotional honesty that makes even its darker elements feel human and relatable. “I think it’s important to not take yourself so seriously. With a lot of this stuff, everyone is crying, but that’s okay. Crying’s good for you.”
These creatures and figures - fabulous and strange - may not be as alien as they appear. The far-out faces in “Body Doubles” might look otherworldly, unless, of course, you’re familiar with multidisciplinarian Juno Birch, one of Baron’s main muses. “She’s blue, and wears a lot of sunglasses,” Baron explained. “Sometimes, she’s pink. Her aesthetic really inspires me, and she’s also a visual artist, and I really like her illustrations.”
She’s incorporated many different mediums into these quirky works - painting, sketching, rug-hooking, digital art, experimental video - “Body Doubles” has a little bit of everything. The textile works, in particular, make a lasting impression. Though visually cohesive with the paintings and drawings, these shaggy tapestries are anything but easy to create. Using a painstaking hand-punching process, Baron builds up the imagery one strand of yarn at a time, finishing each piece with a light shave to crisp up the details. The results are both tactile and mesmerizing, drawing viewers into a space that feels suspended between invention and revelation.
Her artistic influences are as wide-ranging as her mediums: Max Ernst, Michael McGrath, Sailor Moon, Tyler the Creator and Shary Boyle, among others. Boyle’s work left a powerful impression on the young artist. “I saw Shary Boyle’s exhibit in Montreal a couple of years ago, and all of her figures had these nails, and I was just obsessed,” she confessed. “It was really weird - it made my mouth water. I was just so enamoured with the figures… there’s something about the sharpness of those nails - they just really stuck with me.”
As for McGrath, Baron admires his poetic use of symbolism and the bold confidence with which he employs negative space. “I’m always the type of person who wants to try to fill it all in,” she explained. “So with some of these sketches and the rugs, I was trying to just leave it - he proved to me that lots of negative space looks good.”
Ultimately, Baron’s artistic path has become one of inner alignment, rather than a quest for outer approval. “People will tell you things, and share their opinions on what you’re doing, but when you make art and stay on your own path and figure it out, you realize you don’t need to put so much value into other people’s opinions,” she pointed out.
So, why make art? For Baron, the answer comes easy these days. “Art’s a great place to clear your mind and deal with stuff - to process the things that are harder to process when life is moving around. And it’s a great, safe place to make mistakes and take risks without having any consequences. Even if you’re not pursuing art as a job, it still gives you confidence to do life and things your way. I’ve found that doing art has helped me in every aspect of my life… except financially.”
Amanda Baron’s “Body Doubles” is an exhibition that lingers long after you leave the gallery. Its weird, wonderful world holds up a glittering mirror to our own, and invites us to look, to feel, and to ask ourselves what we really want to do with our time on Earth. Don’t miss your chance to experience it before it disappears.