Glen Baldridge & Louise Sheldon ‘Doors in Floors’

Glen Baldridge & Louise Sheldon ‘Doors in Floors’

March 16 -April 7th at Ditch Projects, Springfield OR

Exhibition Reception: Saturday, March 16th, 5-7 pm

Blurring the lines between the hidden depths of the unconscious and the mystical allure of unseen worlds, “Doors in Floors”, featuring works by Glen Baldridge and Louise Sheldon, is an odyssey into the cryptic and the celestial. 

As gateways to clandestine worlds below, Baldridge’s ‘Trap Door’ series reveals entry points to mysterious voids. He weaves a narrative of hidden truths and obscured realities, much like peeling back layers only to find more layers. His work is often enigmatic and dark, riddled with hidden text, echoing the idea that what we see can never be truly certain; wavering between pareidolic phantoms or intentionally obscured clues – a coherent paranoia. 



Louise Sheldon’s grommeted pieces, having spent months underfoot, embody a raw, unfiltered interaction with lived spaces. The scuffs and dirt are not mere blemishes but stories told by the material work itself. Adorned with spiral and floral patterns, her pieces evoke mystical portals, where we find ourselves in freefall, hurling through to a different dimension or state of consciousness. These artworks, while being portals in themselves, could also be seen as coverings for Baldridge’s metaphysical trap doors, forming a nuanced and seemingly perfect intersection – a dance of concealment and revelation.



The exhibition represents a journey through the unknown. While Baldridge’s works hint at hidden depths and secret chambers of the mind, Sheldon offers a passage to somewhere mystical, somewhere otherworldly. Their combined narrative is a complex tapestry, weaving the subterranean with the supernatural, the seen with the unseen.

-Alex Dodge 2024

Glen Baldridge is based outside Portland, Maine. His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the RISD Museum in Providence, RI, ICPNY in New York, the Pizzuti Collection in Columbus, Ohio, and the Spencer Museum in Lawrence, KS. Recent solo shows include Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York; Halsey McKay in East Hampton; William Patterson University in Wayne, NJ, and Fourteen30 Contemporary in Portland, OR. Baldridge has had print editions published by Forth Estate Editions, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, Dieu Donné, Flying Horse Editions, PS Marlowe, and Du-Good Press. His work is included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The New York Public Library, RISD Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, and The Library of Congress, amongst others. His 2023 solo show in New York was reviewed in the New Yorker magazine. 

Louise Sheldon is a visual artist who lives and works outside of Portland, Maine.  She has exhibited with Safe Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Standard Space, Sharon, CT; Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, NY; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, NY, and others.  Her work is in the collection of the RISD Museum. 

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In the Backspace:

Martha Daghlian ‘The Great Art of Knowing’

“We are the ones who, by putting the past to a certain use, put it in a certain order…What I am describing is a specifically transhistorical dialectic, one that invents the critic as Friedrich Schlegel’s historian, that is, a prophet facing backwards.” (Marjorie Levinson, “Thinking Through Poetry”) 

”The Great Art of Knowing” is an exhibition of new multimedia work by Martha Daghlian, with forthcoming text by Kaya Noteboom.