Chris Baily

Practice & background

Chris Baily is a Brooklyn-based painter and time-based artist with a BFA in Painting from Cornell University. His work connects moving images with painting to explore memory, time and inner experience. Figures, birds, clouds and waves recur across his visual language.

In Liminal Dreams, translucent painting on acrylic panels meets selectively animated video. Still and moving areas coexist, creating a viewing experience that sits between a painted scene and a changing recollection.

The same concerns appear in paintings such as Spirit of NYC at Dawn (2019), acrylic on canvas. His website organizes related works around introspection, equilibrium, thresholds and journeys. Sandhill Cranes Dancing (2018) combines mixed media on canvas with projection, while Portals (2025) uses an acrylic panel, mixed media and video to explore stillness and movement at another scale.

In his Who Art You interview, Baily describes a collaborative installation developed throughout an art fair. Recorded footage is collected, selected, altered through painting and other materials, reinterpreted and finally accumulated. He uses these stages as an artistic analogy for memory. A small rabbit derived from a Bryant Park carousel becomes especially meaningful because it preserves a particular moment of the event.

Baily earned his painting BFA from Cornell in 2003. Listed honors include YoungArts, Presidential Scholar, Maryland Distinguished Scholar and the David R. Beane Award for Fine Arts. His exhibition history includes The Sleep of Uncertainty (2014, Untitled Space), Collective Dreams: Deconstructing Purpose (2018), and the 2022 SVA Residency Project, placing his moving-image work within a longer investigation of dreaming and uncertainty.

Looking at the work

Painting on acrylic panels, video projection, mixed media and collaborative moving-image archives. Notice which areas remain still, which move and how repetition changes the sense of time.