Daily Inspiration: Meet Creighton Baxter

Today we’d like to introduce you to Creighton Baxter.

Hi Creighton, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
After living in LA for many years, I wrote this letter over a series of days while sitting on a small bench in Lincoln Heights.
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Right now, in the center of a labyrinth, scattered with statues of Saint Aloysius, between a church and gymnasium, is a boy’s bathroom hovering in the pit of a classroom building. She sits in the one stall that locks, with the metal walls of it — beaten, punctured, scarred and scratched. Boys percuss the stalls each day, with X-acto blades and ballpoint pens, scrawling their text and symbols into a swell of glimmering carvings. And in the now of her tide, she surveys their efforts as she hides. With her feet levitating above the toilet, she reads the walls – her eyes are rubbing on everything, scrubbing away parts she works to forget, but senses a small whisper to look. Her eyes tap over the words faggots die of AIDS, grate up against jaggedly incised hate symbols, descriptions of extinction efforts, scribbled paragraphs proudly detailing acts of rape. She scrubs and scrubs.

Now the stalls are the color of Genvoya, medicalized seafoam, zapped green. The bathroom walls are cream, and they match the painted flesh of Saint Francis of Assisi, who hangs in a frame above the sink watching. Her eyes keep squeaking across the painted hate stall, her sharp orbs removing color to reveal the luster of her hiding place. Now her vision trips over a drawn woman. There are two girls in the stall. One floating above the toilet, who can speak and sometimes breathe; the other is a marking made against a surface – redacted, scraped away, removed through her own presence. A symbol. She was more of a ghost than a drawing. More of a line than a woman. And the sometimes breathing girl wants the ghost so deeply, she draws her own cock between its thighs. She makes the eyes glow, and draws a halo around her head.

A her – split between the flesh and wall, gaze at one another green-eyed. The color of seafoam even. There is a now where they find her in a science classroom, fifteen boys hold her down as the priest is watching. They sever off parts of an unborn pig to feed her. An animal fetus belly up in a green tray. She tastes a dead ear on the tongue. She spits out formaldehyde, as her drawn cock wobbles through a chorus of laughter around her. Together, the boys and priest examine her fearsome genital. The mythic dick of a young girl. Like an eel slapping her ribs in pursuit of return.

A now of seven days since the pig and the classroom, she is gripped again, covered in the piss and seminal fluid of her classmates. The now of throwing glass bottles at a fourteen year old trans girl. A now of trying to run her over with your car.

An even later now, where you pull her hair so hard it begins to rip from her scalp. She is gasping. You pull harder. You hit so swiftly she imagines her cheekbone is breaking. Now your hand grips her throat in the blue projector light. There is a now of Los Angeles, within a room of only curved walls and a gorgeous broken tub. Her hair is covered in blood. The nurses pull drains from her scalp and she can no longer smile but she glows something fearsome as she rests for the first time. She lies there in a now of siblings wiping red from her mouth before feeding her the little green pills she danced for. It is a now where she starts dreaming of trans women as living clocks. A nowness of night terrors in her healing. A now where she thought her tolerance for nonsense died. A now where she can smile again and starts to eat everything.

The first now of controlling the cut, conducting a symphony of violence toward her own divinity. Her sutures are a crown in this list of the present. There is a now right before she meets you. And the scar left from men pulling the skin from her skull has healed into a slightly crooked line at the margins of her face. It is a halo, to match her cock and glowing eyes. But right now, you’ve pulled at her so hard she falls asleep in response to the grip. She leaves your bed. Your room. Your yard. Your little black car. She is moving even faster now, leaving the stall, the classroom, the hospital, the alley. A trail of pig bits and green shit tumbling behind her. After you, she still talks to old lovers. In a now where the light is different. She’s been watching trains in it. There is a bench here down the street from her broken little room. A now of sixteen years since she left Arizona. Her hair is long down the back and blowing. It is her’s.

Like how right now my legs are mine. Now my mouth. Now my throat is mine. Now my belly. Now my hips. Now my clit. My cock. My tits. My breath is mine. Now my mind. My scar. Now my spine. My virus. Now my medicine is mine. They all sit with me on her bench. The light is gorgeous here, you should try it sometime.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I have never struggled or known pain. I have never been hungry, tired, poor, or depressed. I have never lost someone I love. And I’ve never struggled with grief. I have never encountered failure. I have never lost hope. I have never stood on the edge of East LA overpasses. I have never been heartbroken or betrayed. I have never been surveilled. And I have certainly never been abused. In short, my life has been picture perfect. I breathe easy every day. Smiling. Always smiling.

Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
My visual language is one of fragmentation and spectrality. A language where subjects, affects, and theorizations are present but never whole. I engage surface, materiality, and temporal experience as sites of inscription and excavation, where gestures accumulate, erase themselves, and resurface.

Drawn lines stay with the trouble of indexing a fraught presence of authorship. Performance-based methods create a generative force of implication. The performer, the witnessing subject, and the limitations of a performance entangle in a shared space of shifting perception–at the edge of image, text, and matter. My methodologies of repetition and embodied gesture create flickering impressions that extend beyond the frame of discreet art objects. Presence is both asserted and unsettled. Through durational acts, I explore the collapse between action and its remembering, self and environment.

Within my practice, personas, avatars, and characterizations, appear not as stable entities but as apparitions. Eyes become portals, limbs dissolve into fields of mark-making, and bodies are rendered not as fixed forms but as thresholds of emergence and undoing.

Where we are in life is often partly because of others. Who/what else deserves credit for how your story turned out?
Firstly, my sibling Lee Baxter, who is an incredible artist and maker. Life without them would have no color or laughter. And my parents, whose creative rhythms have influenced my own. I am indebted to the artists, writers, and curators who have supported my practice. A long but inexhaustive list:

Jasmine Nyende, Río Sofia, Miller Robinson, Nori Reed, Jude Asadi, Nash Bryant, Nicole Cooke, Alexsa Durrans, edua restrepo-castaño, Donasia Tillery, Steve Locke, Lynne Cooney, Evan Garza, Page Person, Mara Hassan, Matt Savitsky, Alex Fialho, Cierra Michelle Peters, Arianne Alizio, Liz Vasquez, Cecilia Gentili, Gregory Barnett, Harrison Cullen, Cielo Felix-Hernandez, Agnes Walden, Adi Blaustein Rejtö, Lucas Ondak, Sydney Fishman, Zoe Cire, Andina Marie Osorio, Earthen Clay, Fiza Khatri, Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Yacine Fall, Avion Pearce, Nadir Souirgi, viento izquierdo ugaz, Seth Camp, Opal DeRuvo, Genesis Báez, Glam Spencer, Drea Boit, Morgan Zwicky, Bette Marie Gadient, Avery Everhart, Angie Lopez, Courtney Marie Andrews, Brandy Rhoads, Ellis Martin, Ethan Philbrick, A.L. Steiner, Frankie Symonds, Andra Nardirshah, Stevie Soares, Sam Adams, Sue Chenoweth

Contact Info:

• Website: https://creightonbaxter.com
• Instagram: @creightonbaxter