Paper

Juried by Rachel Gladfelter

Wall 1: Pattern

Alix Aidekman / Bevan de Wet / Marjorie Fedyszyn / Anne-Marie McIntyre / Jenene Nagy / Carolanna Parlato / Betty Susiarjo

“One can ascend to a higher development only by bringing rhythm and repetition into one’s life.  Rhythm holds sway in all nature.”  Rudolf Steiner

Whether allowing patterns to emerge from the nuances of the substrate or by creating a controlled repetition within the medium, each artist on this wall has made rhythm a centrality of their work.  Bevan de Wet forms cut paper collage into a free form object with syncopated cadence in Coda/Codex IX and applies watercolor to undulating cast paper pulp in Formless (Surface Tension XII).  Anne-Marie McIntyre responds to the surface of decades-old handmade paper.  She creates flowing palmettes in which gouache, shellac and walnut ink organically pool inside controlled edges, allowing the ebbs and flows of the paper to delineate volumetric forms in translucent color.  Using acrylic paint on toothy paper to create organic separations of color in her Wave series, Carolanna Parlato finds hidden structures and chaotic systems from cloud formations, waves and glitch aesthetics in technology.

Creating visual mantras, Jenene Nagy notes the meditative and transformative potential of repetition, in that a simple action or material produces an energy greater than its component parts.  The weight of water (palm) is a calmly vibrational dimensional piece created from pigmented palm frond pulp and salt.  Alix Aidekman bridges the gap between automatic self-soothing drawings and illusory perfection, working hours on a single piece of paper in a meditative state.  The result is his undulating Blue Dottie.  Betty Susiarjo focuses on the notion of light and translucency in the application of washi paper dots on paper, evoking experiences of the sublime.

Wall 2: Nature

Keren Anavy / Michele Brody / Natasha Frisch / Svetlana Grigoryeva / Amy Hoagland / Iain Machell / Jenna Lynch / Lisa Stancati / Eliza Stamps / Tricia Wright

The works in this grouping convey relationships between nature and scale.  Some touch on regenerative papermaking techniques in response to human interaction with the world around us.  Karen Anavy creates site-specific installations at an architectural scale, engaging with fragmented built environments.  Water is a central theme in her work, representing boundaries and movement.  Folded Tears, created with ink and graphite on rice paper, drapes from found drifted branches.  Amy Hoagland’s sculpture, Synthetic Erosion, embraces the temporal rhythm of landscape.  Our experience is in a constant state of flux and Hoagland’s work posits itself in a moment of pause, giving room to notice the speed of change.  Michele Brody maintains a sustainable practice.  She focuses on regenerating locally sourced plant detritus imbued with meaningful connections with surrounding ecology, history and culture into paper pulp.  In Ghosted American Chestnut, which stands at 112 inches tall and 48 inches wide, Brody confronts climate change and globalization’s affects at a powerful scale.  Seamus Heaney’s poem Bogland opens with, “We have no prairies,” from which Tricia Wright draws to create Bogland Variation #1.  She explores the visceral and bodily aspects of cultural inheritance.  In homage to the book form, Wright creates works that open in a spread, with hand-manipulated breathing pages, evoking skin folds and wrinkles embedded with organic material.  Looking beneath the surface to recreate stories showing the darker layers of human interference, Iain Machell takes a non-literal approach.  He doesn’t imitate nature; he interrogates it by showing forms that make us question the underlying anatomy of what we see on the surface.

Wall 3: Politics

Zihao Chen / Julianna Dail / Elizabeth Lindy / Yulia Rotkina / Kristen Tordella- Williams

Paper has a long history with protest, as a substrate on which to share counter-culture ideas.  The artists in this selection have created works that follow that thread; from pointing out differences between citizen and immigrant in everyday life, to censorship and rites of passage.

Julianna Dail investigates patterns in textiles and behaviors.  Sourcing her materials in the craft aisle, recycling bins, or from someone’s basement, she uses different types of paper, ranging from security envelopes to magazines, to methodically recreate and alter patterns of Hutsul traditional blouses.  Dail investigates psychological and physical restructurings that are evident in the day to day of immigrant life, and their collective stories.  Elizabeth Lindy’s photograph Hunger for Air documents the action of folding and consuming tracing paper, while Silent Mourning shows the space around a form, delineating its importance.  What is the physical and psychological space that an individual has in their already carved-out existence?  Rooted in personal memory and cultural background, Zihao Chen was inspired by the Chinese “A4 Paper Revolution” where size A4 papers symbolized resistance.  Book Series 1 transforms book to pulp, exploring themes of freedom, identity and censorship.  Yulia Rotkina’s What Went Down the Drain speaks to usage and life cycles, reflecting on the profound struggles inherent to modern human existence, such as necessity and waste.

Wall 4: Structure

Diana Baumbach / Diane Britt / Debra Disman / Natasha Frisch / Alexis Granwell / Colin Kippen / Shaochi Lin / Carin Palsrok-Lilly / Cassidy Skillman / Lindsay Slaughter / Janet Yano

Whether sculptural or graphic, each work on this wall gives life to an assured anatomical framework.  Natasha Frisch’s delicate and meticulously created replicas of wooden chairs in Somewhere In Between are created from just tracing paper and double-sided tape.  Highlighting impermanence due to the fragile nature of its composition, the work’s materiality ensures that the installation exists only for the lifetime of its exhibition.  With a structural permanence, Alexis Granwell’s sculptures Drinking Sun and Spiraling Return are comprised of steel, pulp painting, and papier-mâché.  She explores the cross disciplinary phenomenon of hapticity, which explains how visual perceptions translate into internal experiences and feelings.  Shadow Play and Unraveled, Lindsay Slaughter’s creations, involve forms that undulate and shift perspectives.  As she interplays between two and three-dimensionality, light and shadow create a trompe l’oeil, confusing what is cut paper and what is digitally manipulated.  

Wall 5: Memory

Robert Contreras / Harper Folsom / Tatiana Ginsberg / Harri Harrison / Christopher Miller / Emma Mohrmann / Athena Parella / Sophia Pickering / Shauna Smith Softening / Jodie Tomkins

Paper, like memory, is delicate and fleeting.  The grouping of works on this wall explore remembrance, nostalgia and narrative through the intimacy of this medium.  In Forsythia and Forsythia II, Harri Harrison makes cyanotypes from photographs taken in the 1980s and 1990s by people who have now passed.  Created on the back side of floral wallpaper from Harrison’s grandmother’s home, these abstract mountings on discarded wood hang as memorials to a dwelling and, more so, to the people who have made it a home.  Tatiana Ginsberg’s Mae 1939 series, composed entirely of paper, begs the question, “How many stories would be lost to history without paper?”  Based on letters and telegrams from 1939 between Ginsberg’s grandparents and her great uncle’s family, these bits of communication show the intimacies and realities of working to get family out of Nazi occupied Europe and into the United States.  Robert Contreras’ I just need 5 more minutes! draws inspiration from Ecuadorian and Mexican traditions, incorporating effigies of family members into his creations.  Layering previously captured portraits within a staged photograph, paper intervenes fostering a meta-awareness around cultural identity and image making.

Existing within both two and three dimensions, Sophia Pickering makes handmade paper pulp paintings that capture ideas that are both fragile and substantial.  Pickering explores the beauty and trauma in daily life through recreating motifs like family photos, domestic spaces and landscape to confront loss, communal truth and the process of growing up.  Delicate in scale, found in a pair of jeans worn on our last hike together depicts an intimate moment in time as it physically reaches toward its viewer.  Jodie Tomkins’ Mothers Words is a powerful hollow vessel, created from written letters from her birth mother.  By collecting, keeping, reusing and remaking these letters into something else completely, Tomkins aims to answer the universal question of who we are and where we come from.