The Afterlives of Art Scraps

Lori Waxman's preview of this Cultural Center exhibition that has been postponed due to the pandemic.

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Solo exhibition at Julius Caesar Gallery

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August 20 2020 interview with Esthetic Lens magazine about my practice during lockdown.

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My February 2020 interview with Jennifer Samet for the Hyperallergic feature "Beer With a Painter."

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In the summer of 2014, Stan Shellabarger awoke from a dream in which he was making pressure prints on a letterpress with artist Elijah Burgher (whom to his knowledge, had never made a print before). Compelled to make this dream a reality, Shellabarger took a class at Spudnik Press in Chicago to learn this technique and subsequently invited Burgher to Spudnik to produce a group of unique prints. Since then, Burgher has returned to the press twice more to print with Shellabarger. Shellabarger, a member of the Spudnik Press Cooperative, has in turn invited several more Chicago artists (most with no printmaking experience) to make prints. In exchange, Shellabarger only requests that he and Spudnik both receive a print from the session instead of financial compensation. Shellabarger savors the experience of witnessing the working methods of artists he admires and while working within the parameters of their artistic visions.
Running concurrently with Stan Shellabarger’s solo show in Gallery 1, My informal printmaking residency with Stan Shellabarger — in Gallery 2 at Western Exhibitions — features prints by Leslie Baum, Elijah Burgher, kg (Karolina Gnatowski), Kelly Kaczynski, Rachel Niffenegger, Paul Nudd, Steve Reinke, and Jeremy Tinder made in collaboration with and at the invitation of Stan Shellabarger at Chicago’s Spudnik Press. Both shows open with a free public reception on Friday, March 1 and run through April 13, 2019.

LVL3 blissfully presents Cloud 9, an anniversary show marking our ninth year as an artist-run space. Each year, LVL3 invites back five previously exhibited artists to celebrate their accomplishments and positive impact on our programming as we continue to grow. Cloud 9 refers to the intense feelings of well-being and happiness. The work in this exhibition shares the feeling of euphoria and new found heights. It’ll have you walking on air. Featuring works by Leslie Baum, Will Hutnick, Dan Rizzo-Orr, Esther Ruiz, and Cecilia Salama.
Saturday 23 February 2019
6-10pm

Night brings day/day brings night is a selection of intimately scaled paintings from an ongoing project. This project came to fruition in the shadow of the 2016 presidential election. In that moment, the studio became a refuge and a place to contemplate forces greater in scale than the politics of the day. The paintings that emerged meditate on natural cycles and the passage of time: seasonal rotations, the turning of the calendar, and the rhythmic flow of night into day and day into night. Each work imagines a world within a world: a portal, an opening, into the unknowable, and each is tethered to the hope found in the long arc of time.

"History merges with the present through the quaotations of Leslie Baum's painting practice. Baum cites imagery from existing artwork as if arranging partners in a duo while simultaneously trying to learn the steps of their dance. Visitors are invited to move into a floor painting, mountainand SEA(partial) p.c. where a Cezanne-like landscape surrounds the body on all sides. In shape of the day:e.v.l.h, Baum references imagery from the plein air landscapes of Lawren Stewart Harris along with the abstraction of Esteban Vicente. Harris's Iceberg, Davis Strait, from which Baum quotes, was first painted during a ship voyage through the artic. The artist describes this series, shape of the day, which materialized in the wake of the 2016 election cycle as a way to meditate on natural forces greater than the politics of the day. It is hard not to ponder in this age of climate change that a view of the icebergs may not be visible much longer. In the work of Baum, we find another avenue to explore the world, what we inherit from artists, and the traditions of the part through her artistic agency."

Participating artists include: Leslie Baum, Drexciya, Julie Marie Lemon, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Mohau Modisakeng, David Nasca, and Allan Sekula.

Curated by Holly + Zachary Cahill

A new collaborative piece with Allison Wade is featured in Pushing Up Daisies, a group exhibition at Peana organized in collaboration with Triumph Chicago. 

At the heart of the exhibition is a photograph of a concrete mural relief situated at the entrance to the Beit Yad Labanim memorial building (which from 1975 to 2000 also served as the Herzliya Museum's main entrance). In this relief - created by the local artist Shlomo Eliraz - we see a combination of a formal, geometrically abstract arrangement, biblical verses, and excerpts from Natan Alterman's poem, "The Silver Platter" - in keeping with conventional official and ceremonial protocol. Recently, the Mundi_Lab research group of the Technion's Faculty of Architecture in Haifa (headed by Dr. David Behar-Perahia) removed the partitions between the memorial building and the museum, as part of ongoing research that they presented at the museum. Evron has placed a photograph of that relief within the museum space, as an integral part of it, in a bid to tackle the charged historical, national, and local contexts that it embodies. In addition, Evron invited the American artist Leslie Baum - to respond to it in her own language, which engages with the modernist heritage. The juxtaposition between the photograph of the relief and these paintings offers a study of complementary contrasts, bringing together the universal and personal as well as an ideological call for the right to autonomy.

On Friday, September 8, from 6 to 8 p.m., the Cincinnati Arts Association’s Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery in the Aronoff Center for the Arts will kick off its twenty-third exhibition season with the opening of UnFunction, a group exhibition curated by writer and independent curator Maria Seda-Reeder (Cincinnati, OH) that examines the intersection of functional objects and fine art.
The materials with which artists choose to engage have long reflected their particular understanding of the complex consequences of art as commodity. So what does it mean for artists to continue to create objects that will likely outlive their makers? Playing with signifiers of both craft and fine art, the dozen artists in UnFunction undermine and reinforce paradigms of purpose—transcribing meaning from the materials around them in ways that make us question our understanding of function. Interrogating the limits of formalism, applications of affordable and abundant materials, and subversions of the semiotics of design and notions of practical use are explored throughout the exhibition in myriad and unexpected ways.
Featuring artworks by Denise Burge, Terence Hammonds, Emily Hanako Momohara, Sean Mullaney (all Cincinnati, OH); Leslie Baum, Dan Devening, Emily Moorhead, Allison Wade (all Chicago, IL); Daniel Bare (Clemson, SC); Tracy Featherstone (Hamilton, OH); Elizabeth Runyon (Oxford, OH); and Chris Vorhees (Indianapolis, IN), UnFunction surveys a broad cross section of disciplines, techniques, concepts, and materials in an expansive installation utilizing both floors of the Weston Art Gallery. 
 

Booth 553

Leslie Baum
Suzette Bross
Andy Hall

RECOMMENDED
It’s time to call off the search for “new areas of possibility within the known confines of painting.” Congruent with the mission of marketing consumer goods (including art), that is the stated goal of this exhibition, but all that it has found are the usual collection of techniques and strategies found in contemporary academic art. The strongest claim for novelty might be Anna Kunz’s installation of paint on porous fabric, but the banal results clutter the corner of an already aesthetically challenged institutional space. Some of the other art would look better in other contexts. Sherwin Ovid’s paint-skin-over-canvas “ceramics” would benefit from being hung at eye level instead of above the door, while Steven Husby’s calligraphic geoform and Craig Yu’s nocturnal landscape would greatly benefit from proximity to the rest of their work.
On the other hand, the contrasting work of three remarkable women complement each other quite nicely. Rebecca Shore has chosen to follow the Chicago Imagists. Her work has the fragmentary precision of Ray Yoshida and the repressed sexuality of Christina Ramberg. Both pieces suggest a female torso whimsically transposed into a mechanical drawing. She has co-opted the tireless energy of industrial production for a feminine presence, with just a hint of self-deprecating humor.

Installation view of “Known Unknowns” featuring work by Anna Kunz, Summer 2016 /Photo: Clare Britt

February 17 - March 4 and March 14- 22, 2016
Opening: Wednesday, February 17, 5:30 - 7:30pm
SXU Gallery
3700 W. 103rd Street
Chicago, IL 60655
M 11-5, T 12-5, W 11-5
TH 12-5, F 11-5, S 11-2


 The exhibition at Saint Xavier University, mountain and SEA, features an immense painting that covers the entire gallery floor. Baum’s application of acrylic paint appears as watercolor, and the work is liquid and luminous. Composed of 12 separate, but conjoined canvas drop cloths, the painting references tree imagery of Ernst Ludwig Kirshner, Paul Klee, Paul Cezanne and Georgia O'Keefe. In mountain and Sea, Baum creates a space with multiple perspectives, ultimately upending our sense of orientation, location and comfort. Gallery visitors are invited to walk on the drop cloths, to stroll on a painting that, during the darkest days of Chicago, conjures a vibrant landscape.
 

MOUNTAIN and sea

February 28– April 2, 2016
Opening: Sunday, February 28, 4:00 – 7:00pm
4th Ward Project Space
5338 S. Kimbark Ave



1-5 Saturdays and by appointmentThe second installation, MOUNTAIN and sea, at 4th Ward Project Space is primarily engaged with the gallery wall. Continuing to plumb the arboreal landscapes of 20th century painters such as John Marin, Ernst Ludwig Kirshner, and Piet Mondrian, Baum offers the installation as a meditation space. An equilateral triangle serves as a visual mantra, and the triangle appears in a variety of scales and media, most notably as a large, un-stretched painting that reaches from floor to ceiling of this intimate gallery space. The installation at 4th Ward Project Space is the MOUNTAIN to Saint Xavier University's SEA.

Leslie Baum
Co-conspirators and the possibilities of painting in a parallel universe
September 3-October 1, 2015

Hap Gallery
916 NW Flanders Street
Portland, Oregon 97209

503.444.7101
hapgallery.com
welcome@hapgallery.com

June 12 to July 17

Opening reception: Friday, June 12
6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Making Strategies explores the unscripted nature of the studio.
This show brings together several artists who devise specific, essential methods in response to personal brands of conceptual physics, long-term grapplings with process, and material invention.

There is no single language for the cycles of discovery and tactile feedback that happen in and around art making. Artists’ in-studio solutions can be confounding and revelatory. It is a forward motion that is irreversible but never straight. From the making well pour endless iterations, harnessed accidents, direct gestures, indirect forces, and purpose built tools.

Grasp the apparitions that vaguely prompt us! Follow flow! Enter portals to strategic quasar imagining!

Making Strategies features work from:
Leslie Baum, Joell Baxter, Nick Brown, Ben Dowell, Andy Hall, Alexander Herzog, Matt Rich, Jennifer Rochlin, and Scott Wolniak

a comic i created in conversation with robin beth schaer's poem, messenger, is featured on guernicamag.com. check it out!

http://theseenjournal.org/art-seen-chicago/drunken-geometry-devening-projects-editions/

by Ruslana Lichtzier

Language is itself a corrupted medium—to think with, and to write about art. While art can reach singularity, in that it can stand by itself, denoting nothing other than itself, language is unbearably caught in the referential; it is a net of the world as it is (which also hints upon why some modalities of art are so frequently analyzed, while others remain coated with silence).

The Window, The Curtains, The Table, The Floor (green), 2015. Acrylic, spray paint and gesso on canvas dropcloth, wood table part, stain, watercolor on stoneware

In visiting devening projects + editions I was reminded of this; and in return I decided to attempt and write about Art, not Art and. However, prior to it, it reminded me of the joy that comes with seeing a good show. My visit to Drunken Geometry, a collaborative exhibition of Allison Wade and Leslie Baum, was both a mental and physical exercise. While my eyes quickly settled within the territory of pure formalism, my body accelerated in movement, starting to bend closer towards the objects, and then, stepping back, to see the arrangements / installations, until it reached an almost frantic movement—a movement where I was practically running between both of the gallery’s spaces, comparing moves and noting the myriad of gestures. I felt I was gifted back something that I had lost, something that I had forgotten how to look for: play, suspense and discovery; something that children have, a secret language.

(from left) The Window, The Curtains, The Table, The Floor (purple), 2015, wood, stain, paint, watercolor on stoneware. New Things (the persistence of ordered objects) #2, 2015, wood, stain, paint, watercolor on stoneware. New Things (the persistence of ordered objects) #1, 2015, wood, stain, paint, watercolor on stoneware. Many Things Conspired #1, 2015, wood, paint. Accidental Artifacts: Remnant #1, Accidental Artifacts: L.C., Accidental Artifacts: G.M., Accidental Artifacts: Remnant #2,, Accidental Artifacts: B.N.,
2015, all watercolor on stoneware

In Drunken Geometry the gallery floor becomes a stage; on it, the objects arranged in scenes, tableaus of frozen pictures. The main room features The Window, The Curtains, The Table, The Floor (green), a piece that contains four canvas drop cloths, affixed to the wall, and several wood table parts. Here, as the written description proposes, the drop cloth is located in the “background,” while the wood table parts are in the “foreground.” The frontal arrangement enacts a cautious walk; each step raises tension. I wonder where then rests this invisible line, and with it, if I’ll cross into the frozen picture. The tension gratifies; in crossing over, or rather, when I transgress (transgress: from trans— “across” + gradi—”to walk, go”) I am rewarded. The bare objects become agape to a material speculation, while mutating and reinventing their form and texture into something different, constantly escaping my grip.

Accidental Artifacts: B.N., Accidental Artifacts: E.S., 2015
watercolor on stoneware

The background, however, the drop cloths, are spray-marked with objects missing from the show, traces bound in the canvas with an unforgiving horizontality—bound to be forever horizontal, even though they are hung. This gesture pulls the rug out from under my feet, sweeping me into vertigo.

Still, the canvas is not the main attraction. The main attraction, or rather the leading actor is missing from the scene. In the foreground we encounter five sculptural components (the count itself is speculative—in a work like this, which is not only an outcome of a collaboration between two authors, but is also installation in nature, it blurs the defined lines of unified objects and erases viewers’ possibility to follow predetermined logic). These are re-and-de-constructions of wood table parts; cut apart, reassembled, repainted, and treated. The objects explain to me, perhaps for the first time, what Lautréaumont meant in 1868 by writing “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”(Les Chants de Maldoror). The early grandfather of surrealism defined in this the new modernistic vision. He outlined a horizontal composition of familiar elements that in proximity become estranged. Is it possible that Wade and Baum have succeeded in dusting off what has been, for some time, an old bourgeois aesthetics, and instead turn it into a revitalizing sight?

New Things (the persistence of ordered objects) #1, 2015, wood, stain, paint, watercolor on stoneware

In stepping forward, or aside from Surrealism, the show’s aesthetics are not only non-hierarchical, but also leans toward the thin abstract. While working with what we may assume as domestic furniture, the grand canvases give an atmospheric hue. One room is green, the other purple; two brilliant colors that don’t easily succumb to common connotations. There is an ease to the exhibition. Interestingly, it also comes through language. Drunken Geometry’s off space features, among others, New Things (the persistence of ordered objects), Accidental Artifacts, and Many Things Conspired.

Here the theatrical is muffled. Due to the nature of this room being a project space, the arrangements are more loose. Some objects turn their back to you. At arms length, the same movements recurring; the works surrender to the thing as it is and at the same time re-imaging it as something new and different. It is rooted in serious playfulness, an engaged mode of action. These objects—subtle, and barely settled—seem to be accomplished with rupture, suddenly, when they only just begin to solidify.

Indeed, as Baum and Wade describe, “their work marks the horizon of a democratic act.”

——
Drunken Geometry at devening projects + editions runs through March 7, 2015.

Ruslana Lichtzier is a Chicago based artist, writer, curator and educator.

RECOMMENDED

“Drunken Geometry,” the new collaborative exhibition by Leslie Baum and Allison Wade, is a risky proposition. By tackling the classic conventions and traditions associated with the still life, these two Chicago-based artists seek to extend our preexisting notions of the genre by, in effect, taking them apart. The approach is as pregnant with possibility as it is fraught with travails.

Sculptural formulations are particularly susceptible to problems inherent to deconstruction since a table displayed without substantive transformation remains merely a table, an artifact of our mundane world rather than an active agent in the world of art. Though reasonable people can (and should) disagree, objects placed within the environs of gallery are not art by default. The wall-mounted “Many Things Conspired #1” as well as the floor-bound “New Things (the persistence of ordered objects) #1,” which both seem a little too self-satisfied as minimally altered objects, are the most problematic in this regard.

Leslie Baum + Allison Wade. “The Window, The Curtains, The Table, The Floor (green),” (detail view), 2015, acrylic, spray paint and gesso on canvas dropcloth, wood table part, stain, watercolor on stoneware, dimensions variable

The best moments in the show occur as the result of a potent one-two combination when “Many Things Conspired #2-#6” and “The Window, The Curtains, The Table, The Floor (green),” resist the necessity of individual transformation and instead turn their energy outward on the gallery itself, exploding a kind of fractured cubist space into three dimensions. The result is an immersive environment that resembles a kind of assemblage forest where itinerant wooden legs, tabletops and feet collide with oblique glances and fuse into a compelling holistic experience.

Less overtly dramatic works such as the compact “The Window, The Curtains, The Table, The Floor (purple)” demand more than a little effort on the part of the viewer, but it’s effort well spent. The side table’s mismatched leg and painted white foot echo the numerous painted stoneware “Accidental Artifacts” scattered throughout the Garfield Park space. Generally good and occasionally superb, “Drunken Geometry” is a valiant effort to redefine and enlarge our perceptual parameters for one of art’s most established categories. (Alan Pocaro)

Through March 7 at Devening Projects and Editions. 3039 West Carroll

DUCKS LA
curated by Ryan Travis Christian

March 27th, 2015

Minotaur Projects
1821 3rd Ave
Los Angeles, CA 90019

Leslie Baum – Liz Nielsen

LVL3 is traveling to Mexico for the second edition of Material Art Fair, Mexico City’s first and only contemporary art fair dedicated to emerging practices. We will be joining 40 international exhibitors and featuring the work of Leslie Baum and Liz Nielsen.

Dates:
February 5 – 6-10pm – Public Opening
February 6 – 11-8pm
February 7 – 11-8pm
February 8 – 11-5pm

Drunken Geometry
Leslie Baum and Allison Wade
January 31 – March 7, 2015

Drunken Geometry is an ongoing collaboration between Leslie Baum and Allison Wade. This iteration of the project engages with the still life genre and its rich history. The table, the ceramic object, the textile–all are foundational elements of still life paintings and materials that figure prominently in Baum and Wade’s individual practices. Through these materials, the artists explore their affinities for particular forms and arrangements. Decisions about placement, proximity, and color guide the conversation, as well as a mutual impulse to uncover the sweet spot between object and image, dimensionality and flatness.

Clutch Gallery is a 25-square-inch space located in the heart of Meg Duguid's purse, which is currently being carried by by Georgina Valverde as the headquarters for Society of Smallness. The gallery is dedicated to exhibiting contemporary art of all media. Clutch opened in December 2009 and was initially intended to maintain regular programming through December 2010. In December of 2011, Meg Duguid decided that she no longer wanted to carry Clutch, so her favorite accessory is being used by other curators. Clutch will continue to run as a curatorial project until the gallery wears out from daily use. To view this exhibition and find out where Clutch is going, follow it on Facebook, or you can make an appointment for a personal viewing time.

The Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation is an invitational festival focusing on abstract animation and unconventional character animation. Festival programs showcase outstanding experimental animation of all sorts, and include classic films and new works. The Eyeworks festival was founded in 2010 by Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré, and is held annually in Chicago, with additional curated programs presented in Chicago and other cities throughout the year.

The Eyeworks programs showcase a range of animation techniques, including paper cutouts, stop-motion, 3D computer animation, and a wide variety of hand-drawn methods. The content of the films is equally varied, and includes cosmic abstraction, psychedelic characters, geometric patterning, and surrealistic narratives.

Rocket Run: Abstractions From Chicago

october 17 2014
organized by alexander herzog
Elder Gallery, Vance D. Rogers Center for Fine Art, Nebraska Wesleyan University. Lincoln, NE

one art space
23 warren street
new york new york

november 6 2014
6-9pm

New catalog for souvenirs from wonderland exhibition available. Designed by Sonnenzimmer, with an essay by Philip Martin and poem by Maureen N. McLane

Thursday, October 16, 2014
Reception for the Artist: 4:30–5:30 p.m., Lecture: 6:00 p.m., ART 100
Baum's habit of foraging through art history for mysterious image fragments is at the root of her upcoming exhibition, Souvenirs From Wonderland.Her paintings, intimate Sintra panels and large-scale un-stretched canvas "rabbit holes," originate with this search and recovery effort. Through her various studio processes, the images evolve and transform, like word play in the children's game of telephone. Her paintings are object and metaphor and act as a threshold between the known and what lies beyond.

Painting is enjoying a remarkable creative renaissance in the 21st century. Many of the world’s leading artists now work in this most enduring and seductive of media. 100 Painters of Tomorrow is the result of a major new project to find the 100 most exciting, up-and-coming painters at work today.

Their work spans an extraordinary range of styles and techniques, from abstraction to figuration, minimalism to magical realism, and straight oil-on-canvas to mixed-media and installation-based painting. The 100 chosen artists, selected from more than 4,300 entrants, come from over 37 countries.Entries were judged by an international panel featuring some of the most prominent names in contemporary art, including the painter Cecily Brown, curators Tony Godfrey, Yuko Hasegawa and Gregor Muir, and writer-critics Suzanne Hudson, Barry Schwabsky and Philip Tinari.

My Crippled Friend investigates the recent history of the intersection of painterly abstraction and the object. While “painting as object” has often been a formalist issue, the works in this exhibition gather their identity through the subversion of formalism—scrambling and reassembling themselves in an aesthetic shell game where the act of painting is always an investigation of a painting’s ability to push into objecthood.

The result is a collection of works that are each alive in a way that only a painting can be, as well as present in a way that seems more like an object. Impossible to label as one specific medium (“a painting” or “a sculpture”), they are, rather, an often-lumpy but always compelling combination of the two.

check out the artist book/catalogue made in conjunction with my solo exhibition excuse me if i get too deep at geary contemporary!