EYES WIDE SHUT

Descend into the gloriously rich inner worlds of Carrie Ann Baade at an exhibition of her work at Museum of Art - DeLand.

- MICHAEL PEARCE

Collectors and connoisseurs! Take a wideeyed tumble down the rabbit hole of Carrie Ann Baade’s exhibition Mirror Worlds at Florida's Museum of Art - DeLand. Fall into the chaos and madness of a hatter’s tea party turned-funeral feast in her painting Allegory of Bad Government, where a nonchalant Alice sips among the smash and pile of porcelain wearing a midnight mourning gown and carmine camisole in the place of her customary blue dress, and white pinafore, while monstrous Balinese Leyak demons chomp on jewels and embroidered cloths set with shining stones, and lunge across a toppled canvas of Rembrandt’s stolen shipwreck, overturning platters of oysters, fat lemons and the cornucopia of plenty. Alice’s companion among the flotsam is a weasel-beast clutching a rat in one hand, and the other filling a sock puppet, overset by the weeping eyes of a Christ slashed from a medieval painting by a penitential master.

Tumbledown toward the end of the eternally receding table, set for tea but deteriorating into a stage where men march off to war, the slain strewn on the blood-red tablecloth. Tumble over to the terrible toad, a bold narcissist dominating the scene at front of stage, smoothly elegant in a sharp suit, horny and complacent, the crackcheeked king of his crimson court.