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Ali Bailey
A sleeping bag becomes surprisingly evocative when Ali Bailey wraps it around a basketball, transforming the two objects into his anthropomorphic sculpture Sleepwalker (2009). An English artist now based in Chicago, Bailey hides the piece’s steel frame so that the creepy, shrouded figure appears to stand on its own. Indentations in the partly deflated basketball suggest eyes and a nose; it hovers at eye level within the dark blue sleeping bag’s hood.
While Sleepwalker evokes the murderers from teen slasher flicks, its low production values denote the kind of prank you rig up to scare the other kids on a camping trip—and the loss of childhood innocence that GOLDEN identifies as a key theme in Bailey’s new sculptures. The losses of youth are also evident in Bailey’s painted polyurethane Untitled (Baseball Plant) (2009). This perfect replica of a tiny green plant emerging from a split, grimy baseball simultaneously suggests the passage of time, adults’ neglect of once-loved activities and kids’ carelessness toward their possessions.
Unfortunately, another reference to athletic gear—the Roadside Fungi (2009) Bailey constructs from plastic water bottles and Styrofoam pads—comes off as clumsy in comparison. And despite GOLDEN’s brilliant decision to display the spilled Ice Cream Cone (2008) in a corner, enhancing the verisimilitude of its puddle, one wonders how this piece, for all its technical dazzle, differs conceptually from the gag-gift version. Yet Stump (Led Zeppelin #1) (2009)—a model of a tree stump that Bailey has bejeweled with chewing gum, and spray-painted and carved with paeans to Zep and your mom—makes an impressive monument to teenage horniness and boredom.
