Exhibition: Now's Your Chance 2025

Erica Baum, Now's Your Chance Detach, 2025, (Fabrications), Archival pigment print, 15 × 18 in. (38.10 × 45.72 cm), Edition of 6 plus II AP

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 a memento, 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 is a series of hand-drawn circles stacked on top of one another, 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, BAMF, 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, captured 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