Erica Baum

Klemm’s is excited to present Erica Baum’s forthcoming exhibition Off the Hook. Her second solo show with the gallery features her new series entitled Fabrications.

Baum has made a career mining printed sources for new and surprising juxtapositions of text and image. Over the past three decades she has focused on capturing serendipitous instances of found poetry, incidental beauty and humor, which would otherwise go unseen.

Off the Hook refers to the moment when a crochet piece is complete. A knot is formed as the hook is removed, preventing any loose strands of yarn from unraveling. It can also mean freedom from obligation or accountability. In the Fabrications series printed material is woven together through the collage process. Presented in a new context this imagery is ‘off the hook’ and freed from its source inviting a fresh view.

Erica Baum’s Fabrications series is also the subject of her recently published, limited edition Artist Book with Three Star Books, Paris. Just like the nature of her framed works, the structure of the book echoes the principle of layering, revealing the finely glazed undertones of humor and multi-referentiality inherent in all of Baum’s works in the deliberate use of different sizes, the exposure of the paper’s qualities and the gridding of the print patterns. In different visual chapters, reflected in both the publication and the exhibition design, viewers can trace the lineage back to the culturally embedded printed matter via these rhythmic textures.