soaring off the surface
by Douglas Messerli
Howard
N. Fox (curator) Paperworks / the
Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, the opening was on September 26, 2015
What is paper? The Random House Unabridged Dictionary
describes it as “a substance made from wood pulp, rags, straw, or other fibrous
material, usually in thin sheets, used to bear writing or printing, for
wrapping things, etc.” The second definition continues: “a piece, sheet, or
leaf of this.” The new show, curated by my husband, Howard Fox, at the Craft
& Folk Art Museum in Los Angeles, brings this into question by presenting
artworks by a wide-range of local artists that, for the most part, billow out
from their flat surfaces or are converted into sculptural forms that literally
lift it off from the page, catapulting the substance in expressive and
whimsical forms that force us to question its dictionary definitions.
Since Howard curated this show, I will not
attempt to objectively comment on it, but will try to represent the various
contributions of its various artists and allow the reader to come to his or her
own conclusions. I simply say that, if at first I had some doubts about the
ability to these artists to take paper out of its craft context, when I saw the
show I and many of the attendees were wowed enough to perceive that the
majority of these works belong very much in the world of visual art.
Superficially, one might describe a few
of these works as basically flat collages. Soo Kim’s cut-ups of digital
photographs, for example, might seem to represent flat constructions. As Fox
notes, for example, her series of trees taken from winter landscapes began by
her attending to the real objects with her camera, which she then projects as a
digital print upon paper in a four-foot-square format.
But the resulting
picture is not the final form the photograph
takes.Working on a flat
surface, Kim takes scalpels, scissors,
and X-ACTO knives to the image,
cutting away all traces of
sky or extraneous content to leave an elaborately
complex
and random meshwork of images of branches. Some
of the
images interlock; many do not. As a consequence, when
Kim
lifts the cut photograph off the worktable and into
a vertical
position, many strands of the branchy imagery
cascade downward and
clump in a random thicket of paper
toward the lower portions of
the original photograph. Kim
displays her “de-composed”
photographs just so—cut, shred-
ded, and clumping—suspended in protective
box frames.
In Kim’s cityscapes and other landscapes,
moreover, she undertakes an even more complex series of actions. Taking in the
patterns, fenestrations, and other architectural aspects of her landscapes, the
artist cuts away most of the visible content of her photographs, leaving, as in
Midnight Reykjavik, #12,” what Fox
describes as a “skeleton” of that city’s images, displaying what remains
against a white paper surface, creating a kind of collage that reminds us of
what lies behind all seemingly “real” surfaces, as if “unbuilding” a world
instead of merely capturing an “image” of it.
Although once more appearing as flat
representations, the works of Francessca Gabbiani are also about radicalized
space, and use techniques of collage that build up often frightening landscapes
from multi-layering of bits of cut paper that transform flat surfaces into
deconstructed forms into presentations of “radical space” such as her works
with those titles: “Deconstruction of a Radical Space (3)” and “Deconstruction
of a Radical Space (4),” both from 2015. As Fox perceives them, they derive
from pictures of “commonplace but decayed dwellings, abandoned houses where
homeless people might take shelter or disaffected runaways or drug users might
‘crash,’ building up into “woodlands of color, hue, and nuance” that, force us,
as I see them, to rethink the original image as something of mysterious depth
and perspective.
Similarly, if Lecia Dole-Reccio’s works may first appear to be flat painted surfaces, they, in fact, defy identity, described by the Hammer Museum’s exhibition in Made in L.A. 2014, as being “works that revel in an identity crisis. They are not quite paintings and not quite collages. They remain untitled, appended only by an indexical list in a clipped, short form of the materials and motifs that comprise them. The ‘painted constructions’—assembled from cut paper, cardboard, paint, and tape—boldly defy being classified.”
Tm Gratkowski, who studied architecture,
creates sculptural collages that, as Fox suggests, not only “resemble
architectural renderings of structures that have been built or are conceived to
be built, or even elevation or floor plans of buildings,” but are instilled
with a keen sense of their architectonics.”
Most of the other works in this busy show
literally take to space itself, pushing off the flat surface that is usually
associated with their paper medium. Chris Natrop, a bit like the abstract
expressionist Jackson Pollack, begins with a large seven-foot long role of
Lenox 100 drawing positioned on the floor of his studio, upon which he drips,
pours, and brushes colored dyes and acrylic paints, picking up the paper sheet
to encourage random flows of the materials. Yet, dissatisfied with the flatness
of his abstract works he has created, he hangs the final sheets up upon the
wall, proceeding to cut shapes out of it with a box-cutting knife—ripping away
whole sections of the paper in order to create “voids and holes” within his
paper originals. He then often mounts the dried hangings several inches in
front of the wall, which creates a series of shadows and other compositional
designs that he perceives as part of the final “composition,” thus transforming
what was once a two dimensional work into a work of many dimensions, as in the
works as Of Night and Light and the
Half-Light, of 2014-15.
Although artist Margaret Griffith has done
numerous two-dimensional wall-bound works, the work in this show, Commonwealth (2015) takes her basic
images of “gates” into open notions of passageways that embrace the viewer in
space. Hung from the rafters of the top floor of CAFAM, Griffith’s work celebrates
its entry into the world almost as might a bridal canopy, a lovely, black and
white, looping of delicate forms and shapes that, as Fox describes it, “dances
and somersaults” through the space.
Similarly, Lorenzo Hurtado Serovia’s large
banners are purely sculptural, weaving together strips of paper into massive
thatch-work forms that, although sometimes suggesting landscapes, more often
consist of abstract patterns. A devoted member of the Pentecostal evangelical
International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, a group founded in Los Angeles
in the 1920s by the late Aimee Semple McPherson, Hurtado Sergovia’s large
hanging forms seem, as Fox would have it, “like stained glass windows and
priestly vestments,” to celebrate his faith. The banners in this show are not
overtly Christian, but they still evoke, as the curator argues, “a sense of
‘otherness” and realities beyond their own materiality.”
Of the numerous other remarkable artists
in this show, I’d point to the paper pop-art like creations of the
“all-American Jewish lesbian folk singer” Phranc, whose swimming trunks,
life-jacket, and boots seem utterably wearable even though we perceive there
are made of a substance that would not permit their use in water or hiking path.
As Fox suggests, “Phranc’s artworks re manifestly interested in disguise and
false appearances,” and, as such, take a nearly valueless material (used
primarily for another medium, print) into a new possibility, transforming them
into objects of material value.
Using the coarsest of paper forms, kraft
paper, which absorbs the various dyes (particularly red) that she uses, Echiko
Ohira twists, coils, folds, and pleats her material into huge biomorphic forms
that read almost as large blows, bird nests, flowers, and breasts.
Tam Van Tran’s lovely and truly radiant
constructions also project out from the wall, creating curvilinear patterns
with what Fox describes as “swarming and swirling like cosmic rays across their
surfaces.”
With hexapfexogon-shaped constructions of
various colors of paper, Rebecca Niedlander returns a form with numerous
dimensions back into a flat surface, as she staples hundreds of these complex
structures upon the wall, reiterating that what appears to be a flat
one-dimensional surface is, in fact, a truly multi-dimensional one.
Phranc and Howard
Fox in from of a work by Rebecca Niedlander
Along with dynamic works by Enrique
Castrejon, Chris Oatey, Minoru Ohira, and Susan Sironi these artists represent
a redefinition of what paper can be that is as dynamic and diverse a medium as
the cultural and sexual backgrounds of the artists represented.
Los Angeles,
October 1, 2015
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