Ugly Duckling Presse: Dog Ear

Dog Ear

Erica Baum

Béatrice Gross, Contributor
Kenneth Goldsmith, Contributor

ART, POETRY | $25 $22.50

May 2016

a remote and contemplative observation of the world’s wild tumult
The Forward

The concept of Dog Ear is simple and straightforward: dog-eared pages of mass-market paperbacks are photographed to isolate the small diagonally bisected squares or rectangles of text. The photographs are formally quite neutral and sedate—cursorily reminiscent of Alber’s “Homage to the Square” series of prints, paintings and tapestries—but the text also demands attention and it is what allows or coaxes the viewer to linger. In his introduction to the book, Kenneth Goldsmith asks: “Do we see them or do we read them? If we choose to read them, how should we read? Across the fold? Through it? Around it? If we choose to look at Baum’s pictures, how should we see them? As artistic photographs? Documentation? Text art?”

25 full color images; with essays by Kenneth Goldsmith and Béatrice Gross.

This is the second edition.

A limited edition print is available here.

About the Author

Erica Baum‘s work has recently been included in shows at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum. She received a B.A. in Anthropology from Barnard College, Columbia University, and an MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art. She has exhibited in New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Kansas City, Berlin, and Mälmo. Her work was included in the book Vitamin Ph: New Perspectives in Photography (Phaidon Press, 2006). She received a 2008 fellowship in Photography from the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her solo exhibitions include Shuffled Glances at Bureau, NYC, and Erica Baum: The Public Imagination at Circuit in Lausanne, Switzerland. A solo exhibition, The Following Information, opens at Bureau in February 2016.

Praise

Her word play is at once both deeply contemporary and achingly nostalgic, a mourning for a more physical relationship to knowledge.
International Center of Photography

...proposes a divine (or poetic) perspective: a remote and contemplative observation of the world’s wild tumult.
The Forward

Dog Ear is a perfect book to learn how to find the fun in reading poems that ask the reader to work, poems that ask the reader to participate, engage, judge, decide, involve themselves.
A Public Face

The work in Dog Ear seamlessly integrates process, visual poetics, fragmentation, and the use of found texts, four of the major currents in the past half-century of avante-garde poetry.
Sam Rowe, Full Stop

The beauty and grace of Baum's work is in its simple and elegant conception, regarding a traditional mode of reading/manipulating a text - the dog ear - with an eye to the contemporary age.
Ben Hynes, Lemon Hound

About the Contributor

Béatrice Gross is a independent curator & art critic based in New York.

Kenneth Goldsmith trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the founding editor of UbuWeb and teaches Poetics and Poetic Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.