Erica Baum "The Naked Eye"
Bureau
This event has ended.
Part of an evolving body of work over the past decade employing found image and language constructions, the works in this new series are comprised of photographs of printed material — capturing cross-sections, slices of images, and interrupted text strings in her compositions of fanned paperback pages.
Having worked with subject matter from art historical indexes to esoteric printed parlor games, Baum’s works depict the way language and signs are structured on a page or picture plane, developing an in-depth group of works around her given subject. By framing images and capturing details, she manages to uncover serendipitous combinations of words and forms outside the logic inherent in her subjects’ structures.
In this new series, myriad colors outline the page edges of Baum’s chosen subject: paperback books. Baum steps outside of her practice of black and white photography to create lush c-prints of fanned-out soft-cover books — disposable novels, slapdash movie adaptations, and celebrity biographies. Like her earlier work with card catalogues, three-dimensional space is flattened, and pages are compressed, foreshortened and cropped by the camera’s lens. Green, yellow and red strokes of dye file up like folds of a curtain framing a stage. The images, letters and words that emerge are presented in a new framework: stories unrelated to the books’ original plots unfold. A precise, economical storyteller, Baum draws elegant chance encounters and found poetry with few depicted signifiers.
Erica Baum received a BA in anthropology from Barnard College and an MFA in photography from the Yale School of Art.
[Image: Erica Baum "Jaws" (2008) pigment print]
Media
Schedule
from February 15, 2009 to March 22, 2009
Reading by Kenneth Goldsmith March 15, 4 pm.