Jancou, Geneva is pleased to present Naked Eye, an exhibition of photographs by Erica Baum. On view from November 22nd to January 12th, this will be Baum’s first solo show with the gallery and in Geneva. The exhibition will include new and recent examples from the artist’s acclaimed Naked Eye series.
In this body of work, begun in 2008, the artist photographs the fanned pages of dime-store novels, celebrity biographies, and popular non-fiction books. Her strategic cropping and framing of their illustrations, glimpsed between fragments of text and the turquoise, marigold and vermillion edges of their pulpy pages, evoke new narratives born of each viewer’s own free associations. While Baum’s compositions range from the lushly figurative to more dramatically spliced geometric abstractions, all of the works share a sense of dark romance and a voyeuristic appeal. Featuring a cast of characters that includes political figures, musicians, and stars of 1970s film noir, these flattened images of reimagined stories are created without darkroom or digital
alterations.
Erica Baum is known internationally for her photographic explorations of linguistic and literary subject matter. In her poignant reframing of found texts and images, she has created abstract poetry from the indices of reference books, the tabs of card catalogues, and the dog-eared pages of old books. Born in 1961 in New York City, Baum received a B.A. in anthropology from Barnard College and an M.F.A. in Photography from the Yale School of Art. A survey of eight series spanning nearly two decades of Baum’s work is currently on view at the 30th São Paulo Biennial. Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. She lives and works in New York City.
For more information, please contact geneva@marcjancou.com.