"Works Of Paper" A Group Exhibition
Maxwell Davidson Gallery/Davidson Contemporary
This event has ended.
Paper, one of the most accessible and common of art medium, has been used by artists for millennia as a surface for drawing and sketching. This exhibition features eight artists who work with paper, but not in the traditional method of most “works on paper” which typically refers to pen, pencil, or watercolor on flat surfaces. "Works of Paper" includes sculpture, drawing and painting, as well as collage and other media.
Eve Biddle’s series,"Remains," is a haunting reminder of our fragility and humanity. Made of human hair embedded in handmade paper, pulled at Dieu Donne Papermill, they are tiny altars to identity and memory. Individual fibers hold the hair in place, creating a moment of stillness from garbage.
Davide Cantoni starts out with ink on paper but harnesses the sun to burn out portions of his drawings of images from the news. The pictures of war and disaster become more defined by their blackening, even as the paper, once a tree reliant on the sun for life, disintegrates beneath its strength.
Troels Carlsen works in painting, drawing, and collage. His paperworks include the use of antique anatomy illustrations – at once beautiful and grotesque. His detailed bird paintings are uncovered with a revelatory tear in a reprinted title page from an undisclosed book. The voyeuristic quality of the tear invites while the cryptic words on the page alienate.
Danielle Durchslag makes large- and small-scale portraits based on and which resemble photographs but are, in fact, constructed from hundreds of pieces of cut paper. Her work uses layered paper to explore the subtle, powerful process of human emotional development. As in human psychology, each new layer is crafted and informed by the one beneath it, to create a seemingly complete whole.
Kelly Goff’s installation "Hole" uses drywall – plaster sandwiched between paper – to literally break down the white box of the gallery. The perceived destruction and repair of the very thing that makes up a show space is both seditious to the idea of the exhibition, while also beholden to its properties.
Jane South’s work combines both drawing and sculpture. While there is application of pen to paper, her work is three-dimensional, using folded and cut paper to create architectural forms which are both free-standing and wall mounted. The work ranges in scale from matchbook-sized elements, to modular towers and construction taller than a person, turning the delicate into the stable.
Lauren Was’ installation "All Tomorrow’s Parties" immerses the viewer into a landscaped environment created with unexpected manufactured paper materials. These pieces draw from the beauty and wonder of the natural world and transplant it into the architectural space of the gallery. All Tomorrow's Parties is made from thousand of miniature cocktail umbrellas put together to make lush and verdant wall.
Thomas Witte uses cut paper to depict the everyday world caught in the lens of a camera, but strips the photograph of much of its subjectivity, leaving behind a more pure, universal, and atemporal distillate. The artist’s manipulation of paper is a transformative act - the material, or absence of it, become the major components of the artist’s narrative framework, revealing the mystery and beauty of pure form.
[Image: Lauren Was "All Tomorrow's Parties " (2013) cocktail umbrellas, foam, UV coating, dimensions variable]
Media
Schedule
from February 05, 2013 to March 09, 2013