Medium Rare
U
nconventionality is the stock in trade for the artists exhibited in Medium Rare. Mariella Bisson, Gugger Petter, Kay Khan, and B. Shawn Cox flourish in the playground of unexpected media as they hopscotch genre boundaries and elevate everyday materials to the uses of fine art. These multidisciplinary artists look beyond what
is to what could be—and in that process they take the viewer along with them. GUGGER PETTER Denmark-born global traveler Gugger Petter, a widely exhibited gallery and museum artist, employs paper in surprising ways. In the mid-1980s, seeking both limitation and challenge in a medium for her monumental portraiture, Petter found both in the usually fragile material of newspaper, which she converts into sturdier forms by rolling it tightly into tubes, weaving it, and sealing it with varnish.
“Normally, a weaver would have to comply with what’s within the craft,” Petter says. “The edges have to be fine, and it has to be perfect. I’ve never done a weaving like that. I can’t work with anything too controlled. I had to create my own technique based on what might be pure mistake.” Petter’s works embody a balance of tensions beyond the loom on which she weaves. The tapestries hover between opposites: control and chaos, light and dark, the everyday and the historical. Her portraits draw in the viewer: “When people see my work from far away, they
Opposite: Gugger Petter, Young Woman No. 3, woven newspaper, 64” × 44”. Above: Gugger Petter, Woman with Dog, woven newspaper, 27” × 29”.
E VO K AT I O N
JANUARY 2022
9
