Main gallery

LESLIE BAUM - My Mountain, My Molehill

September 10, 2004 - October 16, 2004
Opening reception: Friday, September 10, from 6-9 p.m.
Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday, 11a.m - 6p.m.

Contact: Tony Wight
312.492.7261

info@bodybuilderandsportsman.com

BODYBUILDER & SPORTSMAN GALLERY is pleased to announce My Mountain, My Molehill, a collection of recent oil paintings by Leslie Baum with selections of her watercolor sketches on display in the Project Space. This will be Ms. Baum's first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Referencing distant lands such as Greenland and Switzerland to the more local Skokie and East Chicago, Baum's meditative yet direct works reflect her nuanced observations of the elemental, often overlooked landmarks of a place: rock piles, snow-covered shrubs, anthills, lone tree branches, small buildings, a bedside lamp in a small hotel room. Baum, an avid traveler, creates watercolor sketches to augment the photographs she takes on her excursions. While her photographs act as objective records of these places, her watercolors illustrate personal responses to her travels. Through these reflective drawings Baum recollects her experience of place and then transposes these images and ideas into her larger oil paintings.

Delicate grounds of thin oil wash form the support of Baum's paintings onto which various images from her sketches are vibrantly resized and composed to complete the more complex arena of the canvas. The humble and often diminutive sub/urban geographical elements of her sketches are amplified thereby appropriating the grandeur of dramatic natural forms: a salt pile becomes a mountain range, a hole in the sand substitutes the Grand Canyon. Her stunning new works pay homage to the arresting beauty found within landscapes of Hudson River School artist Thomas Moran's large-scale oil paintings, which were themselves composed from plein air watercolor sketches of the great Western landscape in the 19th Century.

In her most recent work, Baum's use of color has become even more precisely delicate as vivid orange trails through cyan fields, and infinite neutral hues quiver beside one another. Spatial and perspective cues, such as vanishing points, merging parallels, and scale are conflated, complicating the viewer's spatial reading. These multiple perspective possibilities allude to the relationship between time and perspective, how the passage of time affects knowledge and understanding. The final paintings rest beautifully between the ephemeral and the figurative, between abstraction and landscape.

Baum says of her own work: "My paintings are those of the traveler and not the resident. They are more portraits of my response to a place than portraits of the place itself... they are ultimately distillations and fanciful reworkings of a location." Baum's paintings imaginatively demonstrate how our seemingly coherent personal geographies are really composed of fleeting impressions of place and time collected in our memories.

Leslie Baum received her BA from the University of Vermont in 1993 and spent 1991-92 studying at the Glasgow School of Art. Solo exhibitions include A Daytripper's Diary and Leslie Baum, New Paintings at Jan Cicero Gallery (2002 and 2001). Recent group exhibitions include: Private, CRG Gallery, New York (2004); New and Recent Work and Summer, Bodybuilder & Sportsman Gallery (2004, 2003); Here and Now, Chicago Cultural Center (2002); The Emerging Landscape, The Noyes Cultural Arts Center, Chicago; Serendipity, The Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago; Summer Show, Jan Cicero Gallery, Chicago; and The Big Show, Dwellingseries (all 2001). Leslie Baum was recently named "The Best Emerging Artist in Chicago" in the August 2004 issue of Chicago Magazine.