BALTIMORE, MD.- The Baltimore Museum of Art has installed a new work by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City) created especially for the museum’s John Waters Rotunda. The perpetual sense of Redness (2021) is a multi-panel contained structure using hinged and folded canvases to create an electric car and spaceship hybrid that serves as a potent symbol and platform through which to consider the complexity of identity comprised of race, indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. For the artist, this installation is an unclaimed site for hope and escape, removed from the impossible paradox of the colonized Indigenous person suspended in a continual state of resistance. Frieda Toranzo Jaeger: The Perpetual Sense of Redness is on view from June 6 through October 3, 2021.

Toranzo Jaeger’s seductive paintings and constructions collapse traditional depictions of hyper-sexualized femininity—often employed to market the masculine appeal of a vehicle—and reclaims the latent power of the car as an embodiment for unrestrained female sexuality. By using the visual vocabulary of slick cars and the forms of the female body, she creates compelling metaphors that shift gender and power roles. Her new work for the BMA combines oil paint with an embroidery style particular to her Indigenous heritage. The artist’s family members were employed to craft the embroidered canvas, which she has painted, stretched, and configured into the hybrid structure presented in the round as a free-standing structure. Each panel is connected with representations of organic and inorganic links, specifically painted blood vessels and the pipes and tubing of a car engine. As visitors circle the piece, the artwork progresses endlessly from sunrise to nightfall, never arriving, never leaving, and is laden with allegory creating a passageway to visceral human experience—to the redness of pain, love, and the inner machinery of being.

This exhibition is curated by Leila Grothe, BMA Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.
Frieda Toranzo Jaeger

Frieda Toranzo Jaeger (b. 1988, Mexico City) lives and works in Mexico City. Solo exhibitions of her work have recently been presented at Reena Spaulings, New York; Arcadia Missa, London; and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Kunstwerke, Berlin; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; and at Kunstverein Schwerin and SORT in Vienna, Austria.