Exhibition: Now's Your Chance 2025

There is a photograph taken from the inside of the gallery included in this exhibition. The photograph has been set into a dialogue with other images and mementos, thanks to their arrangement inside of a shared frame. Lee Mary Manning took this 35mm photograph of the sidewalk without knowing it would end up here. This method of working is in turns diaristic, unprecious, and recursive. Things land in their right place, always after the fact. Their practice is also situational, keen to everyday phenomena as they unfold—setting oneself up for generative encounter and exchange. In Manning’s work, the vastness of the city and other landscapes meet with quieter, more private images. Scenes of connection, reverence, even tenderness. In another photograph here, there is a child ambling in a field. Through their stillness and singularity, moments resonate, where they otherwise might register mundane.

Directives from the urban environment—both spatial and linguistic—shape the motion and structure of Mary Lum’s collages: Merge, turn, narrow, accelerate, descend, detour, exit, wait.

In one page of an artist’s book on display, there are a series of hand-drawn circles moving in a procession, rendered in tempered shades of colored pencil. These forms are bracketed off by an assortment of cut-out comic book graphics, collaged and colliding: partial views of a criss-crossing bridge or cell tower, extraterrestrial machinery, and cuts from a superhero’s back. Despite their comic splendor, these are reframed as unheroic pictures. Lum’s arrangements of material are pulled from mixed up sources and cities, rearticulated through chance studio procedures. Interpretation and meaning-making arrive belatedly.

Elsewhere in a collage, there is a printed iPhone snapshot of Manhattan’s trash waiting for collection, and a person walking toward 27th Avenue in Queens. This interplay between handmade mark, mass reproduction, and the photographic fragment resembles the disordered movement and psychical intake of the traveling city occupier. Comic book panels and their gutters serve to discharge this tension and contain it. WHOOSH, BOOM, BRROOM. These onomatopoeic words can be read and seen here as much as heard through the semiotic stew outside on the sidewalk.

In another photograph in this exhibition, there is an illustration of a slender wrist, adorned with a golden bracelet and red-painted fingernails. Below it, anchored in a cautionary yellow strip, are the words NOW’S YOUR CHANCE. This is, in some ways, a found image—or rather, the ‘original’ printed source, reproduced and enlarged by a camera, was itself found. Erica Baum extracted this blow-in from her ever-expanding archive of mid-century craft and sewing magazines, which were originally manufactured to seduce the at-home-hobbyist with tutorials mobilizing the commodities at their disposal. Lesson plans in everything from cooking to crocheting, embroidering, knitting, stitching, sewing. DIY galore with just enough to educate, propagate desire, and sell.

Blow-ins were designed to interrupt the readers’ automatic flow while gazing at the magazines’ spreads. One-time offers for subscriptions, coupons with expiration dates, and incessant free promotional offers. These are quick and disruptive pieces of cardstock, processed during the fractional second of turning the page. Act fast! Or don’t.

Baum’s practice is one of acting in the now and refining later. She is constantly searching for wide-ranging printed matter, which she tactfully mines to generate new compositions and structural positions. Magnifications, crops, and folds function as techniques of creative revival. Poetry lives in these chance encounters with the overlooked details of materials already in existence and in waiting. Another blow-in, shot close-up and expanded, features a pattern of black and white rectangles narrowing in on each other, as if headed into a harsh corner or a traffic jam. Running underneath this maze of forms are the words TEAR OFF HERE.

—Michael Moore

Erica Baum (b. 1961, New York, NY) lives and works in New York, NY. Baum received her MFA from Yale University, New Haven, CT (1994) and her BA from Barnard College, New York, NY (1984). Recent solo exhibitions include Off The Cuff, Bureau, New York, NY (2024); Off the Hook, Klemm’s, Berlin, Germany (2024); the bite in the ribbon, Galerie Crevecoeur, Paris, France (2022); A Method of a Cloak, Square is the Chatter, Markus Lüttgen, Düsseldorf, Germany (2020); A Method of a Cloak, Klemm’s, Berlin, Germany (2020). Group exhibitions include Made in Düssel­dorf: Photographs From the Stadtsparkasse Stiftung, Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, Germany (2025); New Directions: Recent Acquisitions, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY (2024); True Pictures?, Museum für Photographie Braunschweig, Germany (2021); Pictures, Revisited, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2020); Making Knowing, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (2019); Anna Atkins Refracted, The New York Public Library, New York, NY (2018); Photo-Poetics: An Anthology, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2015); Reconstructions, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2015); and The Imminence of Poetics - the 30th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2012). Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; MAMCO, Geneva, Switzerland; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; CNAP, Paris, France; FRAC Île de France, Paris, France; among others. Baum will be the subject of a one-person museum exhibition, the bite in the ribbon—a paper show, at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY this fall (2025). Lee Mary Manning (b. 1972, born in Alton, IL) lives and works in New York, NY. Manning holds a BA from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL (1994). Recent solo exhibitions include Kiss of the Sun, CANADA, New York NY (2024); Veedon Fleece, St Carthage Hall, Lismore Castle, Ireland (2024); In Excelsis, Complesso Monumentale di San Nicolò, Spoleto, Italy (2023); Spora, Swiss Institute, New York (2023); Ambient Music (2022) and Love (2018), CANADA, New York NY; Blueprints, Sibling, Toronto (2018); and Trees Is As Good As Anything, Cleopatra’s, Brooklyn, NY (2017). Recent group exhibitions include A landscape longed for: The garden as disturbance, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, St. Augustine, FL (2024); Trust Me, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY (2023). In 2022, Manning curated Looking Back: The 12th White Columns Annual at White Columns, New York. Manning's work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA. Manning is represented by CANADA, New York.

Mary Lum (b. 1951, St. Cloud, MN) lives and works in North Adams, MA. Lum received her BFA from the University of Michigan and her MFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology. Selected solo exhibitions include temporary arrangements, Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY (2024); The Moving Parts &, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Cambridge, MA (2023); Assembly: Lorem Ipsum, Mass MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017); Shifting Perspective, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA (2011); New Work, Barn Gallery, St. John’s College, University of Oxford, UK (2009). Selected group exhibitions include Enter, ICA at Maine College of Art and Design, Portland, ME (2024); Lived Space: Humans and Architecture, DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, MA (2018); Tell It To My Heart, Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland, traveled to Lisbon, Portugal and Artists Space, New York, NY (2013). Lum has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (2022), Guggenheim Fellowship (2010), the Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study (2004-2005), and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship (2012). Her work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, MA; MoMA Library, New York, NY; Oxford University, UK; Savannah College of Art and Design, GA; and the Wallace Memorial Library, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY; among others. Lum is represented by Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York.