"Wrecked Exotics"

Wrecked Exotics at North Optical
68 Washington Ave, Portland ME 04101.
September 3, 2025 - January 3, 2026

North Optical is pleased to present Glen Baldridge’s Wrecked Exotics, a suite of eighteen artist framed risograph prints and an accompanying artist’s book. All display printmaking techniques developed in Baldridge’s many years of studio experimentation. The framed works depict eighteen red sports cars arrested in flight; stopped dead by vegetation. Eighteen days and eighteen ways of wrong: they retrace final frames to an end game. The website of the same name indexed 4967 Ferraris wrecks as I last checked, from over 105 unique brands memorialized on the site. While perusing, I glean the predominance of the color red. Tempted to scrape and analyze all estimated 40GB of the site’s image data just to prove it, I reach for a tendril of that futile revving to churn power at scale. 

Glen Baldridge’s Exotics are mementos to a chosen set of wasted classics: a Ferrari Testarossa, a Corvette... The scale is small: glimpsed moments, an intimate pocket size for a coveting voyeur. I am reminded of Carlo Mollino’s Polaroids, in nod to a link between the provocative stagings of lovers in moody constructed dollhouses, smudging objectification, and Mollino’s deep love for Bisiluro Damolnar, the red Le Mans car that he designed and built in 1955. I look for it in Baldridge’s wrecks: the seedy whiff of bodies intertwined in a thwarted need for speed, muffled to a halt by mundane bushes. 

The means reinforce the object. Baldridge carries intent through his craft, and he lets the classic Riso 390UI’s speed of color separation lacerate the images. Rotating drums tread linear tracks over mis-registered blurs, aping skid marks. The effect, created by not letting the ink fully dry between each of three color passes, lends each of these anti-mutts an unreal, smeared halo. Not unlike Baldridge’s Lucky Sevens--a series of coffins printed as scratch-off tickets--the ruined vehicles become stamped vessels to a disconnected plane. 

While Riso inks, made from vegetable oils like soy and rice bran, are generally considered non-toxic, the automotive paint of a crashed circa-80’s sports car might contain exotic cocktails of lead, cadmium, isocyanates, chromium, bromine and other rarities. What animals will lick these shredded gems as they stand to be discovered; ever unripe lurid hulls, habitats for further mutated species flirting with extinction? There is a playful celebration in many of Baldridge’s earlier works: his figure skaters in pratfall; the glorious disaster of The End's Not Near It's Here. It is the excess hubris and futility of that ‘me against the world’ feeling. These coffins are empty; there is no prize; only thin red ink fading on the beauty of fragile paper. – Aude Jomini