Phyllis Baldino

Biography

Phyllis Baldino engages in a conceptual art practice that merges performance, video, sculpture, and other forms. Rendered with wit and ingenuity, Baldino's ironic performance tapes question the function and meaning of everyday objects and actions.

Low-tech and straightforward, her works often document the artist in the process of assembling found objects, taking them apart, reconstructing them, or transforming their function. These minimalist vignettes, shot with a static camera and often performed in real time, exhibit an anecdotal conceptual humor and an implied, though elusive, narrativity. Typically, Baldino's actions result in oppositions, contradictions or incongruities; she reveals ironic gaps between her deconstructed objects and the meanings or functions assigned to them.

Baldino's pieces are often seeded with wry references to gender and role-playing, which takes the form of ironic costuming and performance. Her witty inquiries into the meaning and perception of objects and gestures are often informed by scientific or philosophical principles. Baldino's video works are most often incorporated within an expanded context of installation, objects, or projections.

Phyllis Baldino was born in 1956. She earned a B.F.A. in Sculpture from Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Connecticut. She received the Charles Salsbury Memorial Award, the highest award of her graduating class. She has had one-person shows at Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, Ohio; Thomas Nordenstad Gallery and Lauren Wittels, New York, and Southern Exposure, San Francisco. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Wiels, Brussels, Belgium; MoMA PS1, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York; Impakt Festival, Utrecht, Netherlands; Artists Space, New York; Performa 07, New York; Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies; Brooklyn Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Santa Monica Museum of Art; and Independent Art Space, London. Baldino has screened her work at the New York International Video Festival; the 1st Video Festival Internazionale del Mediterraneo; Oberhausen Film Festival; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Montreal International Festival of Cinema and New Media; Rencontres Internationales, Paris and Berlin; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the 5th Copenhagen Film + Video Festival. In 2018, Baldino presented two installations in residence at VIDEOFORMES, Clermont-Ferrand, France: Nothing from the Future and Now is Here.

Phyllis Baldino lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.