Until the age of eight, Bailey’s childhood summers were spent at her grandmother’s house in the Russian countryside. It was an influential period in which she discovered the world on her own, where many things happened for the first time and her earliest memories were formed. Sixteen years ago her grandmother passed away and now the house stands empty. For this body of work, Once there was there wasn’t, Bailey returned to her grandmother’s empty house to examine those early impressions. Through this journey of return, she was transported in time, as if opening a time capsule. Here Bailey discovered layers of image fragments captured in stories, old objects, images in albums and magazines. They pointed to the invisible marks, the impressions and mental images that remain, and perhaps for this reason— besides the dust, spider webs and the thicket of birch and cherry trees that had enjungled the outside— the house did not seem abandoned.

Using still life techniques, Bailey constructed installations within and around the house that included the objects that she found on location with photographs that she brought with her of her life after leaving Russia. She followed a similar process with images from her parents home in Germany and her own home in the US, constructing photographs that visualized times and places that are in reality far apart yet exist together psychologically. Similar to the act of carrying pictures in wallets or pendants, on coffee mugs or lock screens, displaying pictures in living rooms or as tattoos— an impulse for continuity, where separate events are rebroadcast into the present through a jumble of images.*