Erica Baum

Good abstract visual poetry exists. Take Erica Baum’s The Paper Nautilus at Bureau. In square photographic prints, Baum zooms in on the dog-ears on illustrated book pages– cropping the frame so that the square photograph is split diagonally from bottom left to top right corner, by the page crease. The dog ears, and the corner of the page beneath them, retain only triangular corners of illustrations and photographs. There’s no linear meaning to be drawn from these works, and yet, the mismatched pairings of triangles form a stable visual rhythm. The abstract squares resemble Josef Albers’s color studies, only in grayscale, and printed out on a dot matrix printer.