Juli baker and summer’s landmark solo exhibition is an investigation, celebration, repudiation and embrace of every shade of emotion that transpired in the body of “She” over a period of 28 days, or one menstrual cycle. “She’s” fictional: a woman, 158 cm tall, weight 47 kg, a Virgo, blood type B, working class (flirts with middle class, at times), partial to Japanese food and the Christmas season, not religious, wishes She were a cat (but at the moment must settle for being a Thai citizen), an amateur pianist and rather emotional by nature.
“She’s too much” is the expression that childhood friends, distant relatives, her art teacher, an old flame ten years her senior, strangers on Instagram, her boss, capitalists who profit off the beauty industry, and the government she didn’t vote for have used to describe her.

Emotions overwhelm her sometimes (all the time), but she has never been able to wall them off.
The books she’s read, and her favorite movies and songs, have all taught her that every iota of emotion, whether good or bad, is meaningful. She’ll face even the most intractable of these feelings with tears of courage.
To all the Shes out there
You’re not too much,
You’re not too sad,
You’re not too happy,
You’re not too angry,
You’re not too sensitive,
You’re not too opinionated,
You’re not too sexy,
You’re not too insecure,
You’re not too confident,
You’re not too boring,
You’re not too feminine,
You’re not too masculine,
You’re not too much of anything and you can never be too free.
“If I suffer, don’t be afraid. Please cry with me instead, should I one day lose the freedom to feel every possible feeling there is,” “She” says to her mother.

For her fifth solo exhibition, juli baker and summer draws inspiration from two red volumes, bell hooks’ “All About Love” and Tara Costello’s “Red Moon Gang”, which she picked up last year. In addition to their covers of the same color, both books are sources of love that embrace the gamut of emotions she experiences over the 28 days of her cycle (that recurs each month), and have helped her delineate and process her emotions, which can be triggered by small events in her day to day life– her favorite restaurant discontinuing a favorite dish– to structural issues – the current political situation, capitalism, patriarchy, tradition and other hegemonic value systems. Her connection to these two books inspired her to begin closely documenting, exploring and tracking her emotions in a journal, then reworking its contents into the 29 paintings arrayed alongside sculptures and other works of art in this exhibition.