Exhibition: Erica Baum & Constance DeJong Art Basel | Feature

Erica Baum & Constance DeJong Art Basel | Feature June 13 - 18 2017

Installation view of an art fair booth, with a suite of color photographs on the back wall and a plinth with a blue and yellow plastic radio on the left hand side. A wooden table with orange folding chairs is on the right hand side, a green radio on the wooden table. Two black and white photographs at an angle behind the table.

Bureau is pleased to present a two-person curated project for Art Basel Feature, this June. The photographic work of Baum and the narrative audio pieces by DeJong represent singular approaches to experimental storytelling.

Baum’s “Naked Eye” series features fanned out pages of paperback books, spread open to reveal isolated figures. Anonymous women and iconic movie stars peek through brightly-colored page edges as if spied through parted curtains. These seductive images are accompanied by appropriated text works: gelatin silver prints from Baum’s historic "Card Catalogue" series and poetic verses from her more recent "Dog Ear" work. DeJong is a writer and performer working for over three decades on narrative within the context of avant-garde music and contemporary art. DeJong’s densely descriptive work, written for her own transporting voice, is here transmitted through modified vintage radios. She leads a meandering chronicle through myriad environments: a bustling Madison Avenue, a log cabin warmed by a crackling wood fire, a tour of a dusty apartment and its guest room revenants. The radio serves as the portal to complex worlds described by DeJong’s disembodied voice as Baum stitches fragmented stories together through captured slices of image and text.

A straight on shot of a white wall featuring 5 color photographs framed and matted in white. Each shows the fanned out pages of books, with a female figure, an illustration from within the book captured between the pages.
Installation view showing a color photograph of a book whose pages are fanned out, inside the pages we see a blonde woman looking out suggestively. To the right is a blue and yellow plastic vintage radio.
Installation view; on the left is a white plinth with a vintage plastic radio which is pink and white. On the right is a color photograph of a book which is open to a page showing a black and white photo of Marilyn Monroe in a boa and smoking a cigarette.
Installation view of 4 square, minimal color photos in a grid at left, and on the right a plinth with an old radio. The photos show the dog eared pages of books, the words making a right angle, each one is different in composition of words and color of pages. The radio is brown bakelite.

Photography by Justin Meekel.