Erica Baum was born in 1961 in New York, where she currently lives.
Since the mid-1990s, Erica Baum has been collecting words and images from books, newspapers, libraries, and other repertoires of signs. Through the medium of photography, these fragments of everyday life are collected, cropped, enlarged, and juxtaposed in compositions reminiscent of concrete poetry, as well as certain aspects of conceptual art and the Pictures Generation aesthetics.
Yet this body of work has developed a singularity and coherence all its own. It generally unfolds through long-term series. These include for example Blackboards, in which ephemeral chalk inscriptions on university blackboards are elevated to the dignity of archaeological evidence; Card Catalogues, which explores the ways and conditions of library index cards, revealing the strangeness and accidental humor they contain; and The Naked Eye, which captures the edges of half-open paperbacks and their poetic collisions of visual and textual fragments.
Her work is represented by Bureau (New York), Crevecoeur (Paris), and Klemm’s (Berlin).
