Perch is a giclee print produced on the occasion of the 2013 Independent Art Fair in New York. This print, a photograph of two parakeets, one white and one yellow, hints at a past history in another publication. Looking closely, one can see the gutter of a book and the slight discoloration of printer’s dots as the book ages. The bend of the pages distorts the birds’ symmetry until one seems to shrink in the face of the other’s plumage. Baum has long been interested in the reappropriation of text systems for poetic and artistic invention. Her past works have repurposed paper dolls, card catalogues, matching games, player piano sheet music, and dog-eared books. Each print is signed and numbered by the artist.
Erica Baum (b. 1961 in New York) works primarily in photography and text. Baum initially studied Anthropology at Barnard College before earning an MA in Applied Linguistics from Hunter College and an MFA from Yale University in Photography. Erica Baum gained notoriety for an early series of photographs she took of close up images of blackboard smudges, in which the chalk writing had been obscured by erasers. From this point on, Baum has diligently used photography as a means for capturing the folding, erasing, or collapsing of language in material. This effort has been met with international acclaim and recognition for her work. Baum has been featured in the New York Times. Her work has been exhibited at Bureau in New York City, Marc Jancou in Geneva, Switzerland, at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Galerie Crevecoeur in Paris, France, among numerous group exhibitions. Baum’s photographs are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
