Erica Baum - Off The Hook
KLEMM’s Berlin
Erica Baum - Off The Hook
March 1st - April 13th, 2024
Written by: Makenna Karas
Photo Editor: Billy Delfs
Erica BaumAngora Face2023Archival Pigment Print wooden frame53 x 40 cm
Known for her whimsical and elegant work with combining text and image, Erica Baum’s latest exhibition “Off the Hook” invites you to walk through the ambiguous beauty of seemingly random juxtapositions, collected from vintage magazines.
Erica Baum: “Off the Hook”
An element of visual poetry spills across Erica Baum's images, casting each in a light of ambiguity and intrigue. Known for her eclectic work with collages, where she pieces together scraps of text and images excavated from various found sources, her latest exhibition, "Off the Hook," focuses on pieces found in vintage magazines. Soaked in elegance, whimsicality, poignance, and play, the show is on display at Klemm’s Berlin through April 13th, 2024.
Erica BaumSnap If2023Archival Pigment Print wooden frame48 x 41 cm
Interested in the possibilities of visual pairing, Baum spent several years collecting vintage magazines from the 1960s and 70s, interested in both the subject matter and the physical material of the pages. Aimed at housewives, the sources she used for “Off the Hook” contain everything from practical cooking guides to elegant fashion shots. The diverse range is examined and amplified through works such as “Snap If,” where the image is fractured and divided yet coalesced as one working body. A well-dressed woman is fashionably snapping a photo with a camera to a suitable stand. Yet, in her iconic way, Baum pieces together fragments of elusive text to add ambiguous depth to the work. In the middle, the word “if” kisses the boundary between where it ends and where the woman begins. Combining black and white with pops of red, it’s visually stunning and cognitively perplexing.
Erica BaumIn Step2024Archival Pigment Print wooden frame47.75 x 40.64 cm
“Angora Face” presents similarly, where formal elegance is placed directly alongside the absurd. Sharing the same vertical fracture lines as “Snap If,” the image appears as a black-and-white world devoid of color, except for the woman peeking through the slats. Dressed in pink and peering with unmistakable curiosity into the world she is being kept from, there is something eerie, yet beautiful, about the elusive nature of the collage. When placed within the context of the era it was collected from, the image is almost reminiscent of how women were peaking out into the real world at this time, daring to claim their own space within it.
Pivoting into full whimsicality and play, “Purple Egg Red Hand” evokes your senses with brilliant color and subject matter. Featuring an egg with enormous eyes and feet on the left and a deep red hand reaching upwards to the right, the piece is a quintessential example of the surprising juxtapositions that Baum is known for experimenting with. When confronted with such a relentlessly puzzling pair, your mind reaches for meaning, for some semblance of sense where there is perhaps none. That is the beauty of this collection. It offers visual play to meander through the ambiguous confines of arriving at ideas and junctures of emotion that you would have otherwise been a stranger to.
