toile series by Amelia Bauer

needle-pointed explosion pillows (based on movie stills) by Amelia Bauer

Amelia Bauer Non-mailable Matter, collaboration with Line Up, 2007
“The Book of Stamps” published by Cabinet Books, New York

Ranging from the beautiful to the grotesque to the absurd, the images depicted in the stamps contributed by Line Up (a collective comprising Amelia Bauer, Robert de Saint Phalle, Tim Dubitsky, and Tobias Wong) seem to be organized according to no discernible logic. In fact, these Nonmailable Matter stamps depict an incomplete inventory of the occasionally improbable articles that the United States Postal Service USPS prohibits from going through the mail. The list below, excerpted from the catalogue of items and substances restricted by the Aviation Mail Security & Hazardous Materials Programs of the USPS, corresponds with the images on the following page:

Fireworks; Cleaning supplies; Blood; Kittens
Perfume; Scabs; Glue; Butterflies
Magnetized Materials; Fire Extinguishers; Nail Polish; Cement
Mushrooms; Contraceptive Devices; Paint; Diseased Cells
Fruit; Turtles; Fighting Cocks; Explosives

“Here’s Lookin’ at You” by Amelia Bauer

“Here’s Lookin’ at You,” designed for Terminal 5 at JFK International Airport, examines the increasingly blurred boundary between public and private life after 9/11 and the ownership of one’s image in the information age. The viewer enters a seemingly conventional booth, closes the privacy curtain, inserts money, and poses for the timed strobes. When the photo strip is developed, however, the images appear not as standard frontal shots, but as seen from above by a hidden security camera inside the booth. The keepsake images produced by “Here’s Lookin’ at You “ is a reclamation of one’s skewed, captured image. The booth’s camouflage of familiarity enhances the disturbing effect of its product.