Mowry Baden

Brief Biography

Born in Los Angeles in 1936 and educated at Pomona College and Stanford University, Mowry Baden has lived and worked in Canada since 1971. He has practiced sculpture for nearly 50 years and has taught sculpture at Raymond College, Pomona College, UBC, and the University of Victoria, from which he retired in 1997.

Articulating an internal awareness of movement has always been the most important element in his work. Over the past 43 years, he has developed various methods of decentering vision and interfering with habitual human gestures. He has built harnesses, furniture, rooms, pathways and catwalks, all with the goal of impinging upon the viewer’s movements and awakening a physical self-awareness that was previously unconscious.

Baden tries to provoke a perceptual crisis that assaults the viewer’s confidence in the information that comes through the senses. His practice has always involved materials, just like any artist who makes objects. Ideally, however, he is less interested in the object than in the experience. He wants the viewer to enter the object (or the space) and have an experience that is visceral, internal, and sensorially cross-circuited.