Chellis Baird

RX&SLAG is delighted to present the first solo exhibition in France by American artist Chellis Baird, following on from her collaboration in 2023 with SLAG&RX New York, curated by Seph Rodney. The fruit of her artistic residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris last April, “Mood Machine” presents unique works in which the artist doesn't just paint: she sculpts colour.

A former stylist with a BFA in textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design, she began her career as a designer for renowned couturiers such as Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren and Tuleh. In 2017, she studied art at the Art Students League in New York. In autumn 2021, she presented her first solo museum exhibition at the Myrtle Beach Art Museum in South Carolina, marking a significant turning point in her career as an artist. Today, she devotes herself fully to her work as a visual artist, weaving a unique dialogue between matter and emotion.

C. Baird has exhibited in numerous venues, including solo shows at the Spartanburg Art Museum in 2023 and the Nassau County Museum in 2024. Her work has also been shown at the National Arts Club and can be found in several private collections. Her art has been featured in influential publications such as The New York Times, Artnet, Elle Magazine, Forbes, Architectural Digest, Luxe Interiors Magazine and Portray Magazine, underlining her recognition in the art world.

It was during her residency at the Cité internationale des arts in Paris that the artist was able to further develop her “Mood Machines” series of vibrant, visceral works, which capture the raw energy of feelings through tactile, dynamic and colourful compositions. The choice of title makes perfect sense: it echoes her entirely handmade textile works, combining painted fabrics, pigmented wax, acrylics and aerosols. These materials create new textures, where colour becomes a universal language, a mirror of our states of mind. Each piece is then meticulously hand-sewn onto canvas using waxed thread.

For the artist, everything starts with colour. Colour carries our emotions and our memories. C. Baird draws her inspiration from emblematic figures of colour such as Yves Klein and Anish Kapoor. Her colours are never chosen at random: she makes her own wax pigments and dyes her fabrics.

The works in this series take the form of interlacing colours and evoke what might be the mechanism of an emotional machine, with no starting point and no end. It's as if the emotions represented were intertwined in a continuous flow, reflecting the complexity of our emotional experience. These compositions become sensitive metaphors for our inner workings, where feelings overlap, merge and respond to each other.