Erica Baum: Taxi, 2014, archival pigment print, 16 by 17 inches, edition of 6; courtesy of the artist and Bureau, New York.
Erica Baum’s square-format photographs of dog-eared book pages make the paperbacks you often see stacked on city stoops or in the dollar bins at bookstores look like art materials in waiting. Baum has developed nearly a dozen series using this material over the past 20 years, many of which are ongoing (e.g. her “Viewmasters” and “Naked Eye” pictures). New in this show are her “Stills,” which, like earlier work, involve folded book pages, but instead of featuring poetic mashups of found text from different pages meeting at 90-degree angles, she draws our eyes to fragments of abstract imagery that almost fit together but are ever-so-slightly mismatched.