[New York, NY]

Erica Baum's solo exhibition at Bureau
September 15, 2012, 7:00 pm
at Bureau

Solo exhibition by Erica Baum, word artist currently featured in the 30th São Paulo Biennial, which included some 105 works from Baum's photographic series from her gelatin silver prints of found text and imagery on classroom chalkboards in Blackboards (1994–95) to her well-known Card Catalogue (1996–97) and Naked Eye (2008–12) series, which show her penchant for delving into dense folios, mining them for unexpected and beautiful combinations of text and image. Also included with be the artist's less well-known works from her Frick (1998), Index (1999-2000), Piano Roll (2008) series, which show how found juxtapositions of words, numbers, and notations on a page can reveal complex abstractions and found poetry. Baum will also present a number of works from her new series Blanks (2011–12) which are her most sumptuously abstract works yet, having evolved, sans-text, from her recent work scanning the folded down pages of book pages, revealing found poetry and strong geometric forms in her Dog Ear pieces (2009–10). "All of Baum's texts hold up to close scrutiny. It's here that the crux of her practice is revealed; she has selected these dog ears equally for their visual and literary merits. [...] If she's just visually fetishizing old books, any page would do. But it's the bouncy resonance of the texts, combined with the striking beauty of these configurations, that gives this body of work the power that it has." –Kenneth Goldsmith http://www.bureau-inc.com/mainsite/Artists/Erica/EricaImages1.html