[Pittsburgh, PA]

Erica Baum at PGH Photo Fair
April 27, 2019, 10:00 am
at Carnegie Museum of Art

Bureau at PGH Photo Fair 

Featuring work by UDP author Erica Baum (DOG EAR 2016) from 1994 to the present from the series Desktops, Blackboards, Card Catalogue, Dog Ear, Naked Eye and Patterns:

Baum’s Blackboards photographs, taken after hours in Yale University classrooms, capture the erasure of language in the space of knowledge production. In each photograph, wiped chalk lines and phantasmic word fragments appear at the abyss of abstraction. (-Howie Chen) These early works allow the eye to rest on expanses of empty blackness and lush swaths of dusty chalk between the squares of concrete poetry.

The Naked Eye photographs capture dime-store paperback books, spread open to reveal a rhythm of sliced pictures. What at first look like collages, these unaltered straight photographs of the fanned-out pages feature slivers of found portraits, fractured text and accidental abstraction, layered in a cinematic shuffle.

Patterns—Baum’s newest series of photographs—capture the textures, contours and words from twentieth century sewing patterns. These geometric poems hint at the constriction that the diagrammed garments might impose on their wearer. Each relishes the wordplay of a current that both buzzes and dictates, and a line which can contour a waist or parse a phrase.

 

Free and open to the public.

Erica Baum will be signing books at Bureau’s booth at 1pm on Saturday April 27.

More information here.