Erica Baum’s enlargements of dog-eared book pages, from the series Stills, are the product of her thumbing through hundreds of books and keeping tabs: presented here are Kent State and The Warren Commission (both 2014). blvxmth's freestanding SS21 (2021)—an iPhone on a tri-pod with a tungsten ring light—takes the home video-chat apparatus and shuts it down. On inspection, the image on the phone’s screen (a mise en abyme portrait of the artist taking a self-portrait) is a printed photograph, glued to and blocking the functionality of the ubiquitous machine. Darya Diamond’s Water Sports (2020), an arrangement of handmade porcelain tiles, is a doubly gridded array: each tile is screen-printed with stills from a self-surveillance video which show the artist, naked and squatting, from multiple angles, engaging with and performing for a john. Ann Weathersby’s boxes hold and frame reworked covers and pages of books from the artist’s adolescence in combination with other materials: leather, pigmented kiln-formed glass, and the brass, wood, and glass the boxes are made of. The saturated emotional affect of the manipulated images and texts is so potent, often pained, that it nearly ruptures the serious, mature materials that encase them. Weathersby’s work here, Memories made themselves with almost architectural order (2018-2019), is cold and warm at once.

B. Ingrid Olson’s Never odd or even (perhaps the bone I am biting is my own tail) makes use of traditional photography, reinventing within the tradition: the center of one photograph (UV printed directly on matboard) is cut away, revealing and framing (as a window mat does) another photograph. Dated 2013/2020, this object is a compression of two disparate moments separated by several years. Jacques Vidal’s cut and layered Back to School Special (2020) bucks notions of surface and image. Although a central form emerges from the ground, the entire work is a dizzying series of radial—nearly topographic—lines that seem to describe something non-visual: a psychic disturbance. Antonia Kuo’s Egress (2021) is made with the physical materials of photography, but without a camera: light-sensitive silver gelatin paper is colored and transformed with photochemical splashes, burns, and drips. Tom Jarmusch has the only unaltered photograph in the show, the small, beautiful, black and white Untitled (games) (2020), a single image he insistently produced with a stubborn, malfunctioning Polaroid camera. Patricia Treib’s intimate egg tempera painting on paper is nowhere near a photograph—a few elegant marks made with a brush—but as always with her work, its effortlessness and immediacy is a careful study, refining and digesting the referent she works from; the marks are never fully removed from the source from which they are derived. Treib’s title, Scarlet Sleeve Variation (2021), tells us what we see. Otis Houston Jr.’s fantastically earnest and self-evident spray-painted text on towel reads Better to Work and Fail then Sleep Ones Life Away (2021), calling out over the din below. But it’s not noisy in here; in fact, it’s quite peaceful. Each work is so self-assured; each work a hole of its own.

Clockwise from entrance:

B. Ingrid Olson
Never odd or even (perhaps the bone I am biting is my own tail)
2013-2020
Inkjet print and UV printed matboard in aluminum frame
14.5 x 12.5 inches or 12.5 x 14.5 inches (36.8 x 31.75 cm or 31.75 x 36.8 cm)

Tom Jarmusch
Untitled (games)
2020
Polaroid
3.25 x 4.25 inches (8.26 x 10.8 cm)

Otis Houston Jr.
Better to Work…
2021
Spray paint on towel
25 x 49 inches (63.50 x 124.46 cm)

Erica Baum
Kent State
2014. From Stills
Archival pigment print
15 x 14.83 inches (38.10 x 37.67 cm)
Edition 3/6 + II AP

Patricia Treib
Scarlet Sleeve Variation
2021
Egg tempera on paper
7.5 x 5.5 inches (19.05 x 13.97 cm)

Erica Baum
The Warren Commission
2014. From Stills
Archival pigment print
15 x 15.03 inches (38.10 x 38.18 cm)
Edition 1/6 + II AP

Antonia Kuo
Egress
2021
Unique chemical painting on light-sensitive silver gelatin paper stretched over wood panel
40.5 x 30 inches (102.87 x 76.2 cm)

Darya Diamond
Water Sports
2020
15 screen-printed porcelain tiles
38 x 33 inches (96.52 x 86.36 cm)

Free-standing:

blvxmth
SS21
2021
Inkjet photograph, iPhone7, screen protector, tri-pod, ring light
61 x 20 x 20 inches (154.94 x 50.8 x 50.8 cm)

Ann Weathersby
Memories built themselves with almost architectural order
2018-2019
Book, tape, leather, aluminum, hinged wooden box with glass glazing
11 3/8 x 25 1/2 x 1 5/8 inches (28.89 x 64.77 x 4.13 cm)

Dining room:

Jacques Vidal
Back to School Special
2020
Photo collage on panel
32 x 23.5 inches (81.28 x 59.69 cm)

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