Erica Baum
Photographs
May 19 - June 30, 2000
opening reception May 20, 6-8 pm


From May 19 through June 30, D’Amelio Terras will present its first one-person show with photographer Erica Baum. In the series of work leading up to her current show, the artist has focused on texts captured from various sites of scholarly notation: blackboards, the Frick subject catalog, library card catalogs, and, in this last series, book indices.

Fragments of an index reveal the unexpected fictions, rhythms and poetry hidden within a book’s internal system of reference. The juxtaposed words from these unidentified books are presented to the viewer unaltered in order to suggest that poetry and meaning are latent in the everyday, lying around quietly, waiting to be noticed in a new way.

When these index selections are xeroxed and enlarged, bits of visual information turn up haphazardly. The woven texture of a cloth bound book and its pages, dots on the flatbed, and other pictorial noise are reworked into the final image which is then scanned into a computer and processed to create these digitally exposed white and dark blue C-prints.

Ms. Baum received her M.F.A. from the Yale University School of Art in 1994. She has been included in group shows at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden, Germany, as well as in a show curated by Bill Arning at Grand Arts in Kansas City, Missouri. Recent shows include a three-person exhibition at the Elsa Mott Ives Gallery, New York.