Paper Shapers

Paper Shapers Jaime Bennati Joe Cypressi Elizabeth Dove Scott Hazard

Jason Hughes Leslie Shellow Renee van der Stelt

The Silber ART Gallery Goucher College Athenaeum

“ The artist is a receptacle for emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider’s web.”

— Pablo Picasso

In Paper Shapers, Jaime Bennati, Joe Cypressi, Elizabeth Dove, Scott Hazard, Jason Hughes, Leslie Shellow, and Renee van der Stelt, highlight the many ways paper can be manipulated. Whether by folding, cutting, rolling, piercing, layering, weaving, or molding, these seven artists use paper as their primary artistic medium, but show us much more than sheets, pieces, or scraps.

Paper artist Jaime Bennati examines society’s material consumption and hopes, by gathering often-overlooked materials, the viewer will question the way humans impact the environment. A large part of her work is based on processes found in nature, and she has begun to work on projects that encourage community involvement. Her most recent work, completed while living in Goiânia, a city in central Brazil, involved collecting discarded bus tickets (on average, 200,000 are discarded daily). Along with paper sculptures and collages created with the material, the project resulted in a workshop and community conversation about reusing materials.

Sit Pass, 2011 discarded bus tickets dimensions variable

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Joe Cypressi believes sculpture should work in the round, luring viewers from across space and guiding them to the optimal viewing experience. The twisting shape, with wrinkly, undulating forms, tries to break every plane it can find; the squiggly spirals lead the viewer around the work, hoping to seem visually tasty enough to be worth devouring completely. However, the constant ambiguity of the work keeps the viewer at bay.

There are myriad relationships between the conceptual attributes of paper and any given subject matter, but none more interesting than the exploration of form and space.

Cypressi’s works seek to warp and unsettle the space in such a way that the viewer does not wish to retreat to a place uninfected by the garish form and color, which amplifies these shapes and increases movement through the work.

At first glance, Cypressi’s recent work eludes certain identification. His large, organically inspired sculptures do not neatly fit into interiors, though this is where they are most provocative, where they can command space, demand attention, and invite close examination. Rather, the scale, surface texture, and organic configuration of these works seem more suited to open, sunlit, exterior space, where time and substance mingle freely.

Organic Baroque (Study 1), 2010 paper pulp, steel, pigment 8’ x 4’ x 3’

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Elizabeth Dove cuts up dictionaries, letter by letter. This action is a dialogue with the desire to comprehend and find meaning. The cutting is a reminder of how we subdivide and categorize in an attempt to understand, to learn, and to control.

Dove produces a pile of letters: text dust. It’s a beautiful material, one that radiates longing, loss, and complexity.

A disordered pile of individual letters isn’t meaningless.

Instead, the fractured words represent the inability to forge or decipher meaning, even though that possibility remains.

This series is called a corpus, making a direct reference to a collection of writings and to something pertaining to the human body. Dove selected words for this series by thinking about the mysteries of our minds and our bodies and of the difficulty establishing meaning through text alone. How many layers of meaning are there in a word? Can so few letters as contained in these printed pouches really elucidate meaning?

Visual and conceptual dualities underlie Dove’s work: mind and body; structure and chaos; the known and unknown; public and private; word and image; memory and experience.

Corpus of the Unknowable, 2003 cut up dictionary text and collagraph printing 7.5” x 7.5” each

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Scott Hazard’s photograph- and text-based constructs consist of layers of images or paper that are carefully torn or cut, spaced apart, and aligned to define a sculptural void. As the viewer’s gaze traverses each photographic construct, vision becomes tactile, lending an articulated viewing experience and a space for the eyes to linger.

In the text-based constructs, the movement and placement of words in and around the composed landscapes provides for a kinesthetic reading experience that draws the viewer in for momentary reflection and a temporary departure.

With a seemingly constant barrage of stimulation, most people are concerned with their own business, unable to notice the more subtle aspects of the world. Hazard’s work temporarily removes or alters the viewer’s existing frame of reference and provides a different presence of mind, a distilled frame of reference. As Walt Whitman wrote in the preface to Leaves of Grass, “the greatest poet...If he breathes into anything that was before thought small it dilates with the grandeur and life of the universe.”

Cloud Chamber, 2011 cut and stacked photographs 9.5” x 14”

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Since 2007, Jason Hughes has been weaving with shredded money to explore ideas of labor, value, and worth. These highly crafted and meticulous works not only illustrate his painstaking process, but they also highlight the disparity between skilled labor and industry in the United States. By carefully reconstructing dollar bills previously removed from circulation and shredded by the government, Hughes reconstitutes a new set of values on the otherwise worthless strands of money.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy, 2011 shredded money 8” x 8”

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While walking in the woods, along seashores, and near river beds, Leslie Shellow closely observes growing and dying organisms and reflects on their intricate patterns and interactions. In her installations, she invites the viewer to notice things they might normally overlook or disregard and to remember the world beneath our noses and outside our awareness.

Shellow’s process is spontaneous yet slow, methodical yet intuitive. She builds one small element on top of another in the very time consuming, arduous process of drawing and cutting every piece by hand. While the task of making the objects takes months or years to complete, the installation itself is a fluid, intuitive process that is conceived on the spot and completed in one week. She approaches the gallery with little preconception of how the work will end up—the landscape seems to grow of its own volition. The methodical yet haphazard process represents what Shellow feels is happening in nature, both inside and outside our bodies.

Cause and Effect, 2011 toilet paper rolls, acrylic paint site-specific installation dimensions variable

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Renée van der Stelt’s scored and folded drawings showcase the history of repeated actions, emphasizing the variation of form produced through slight alterations of movement. The tools are few: paper, knife, ruler, time, and energy. In the Silber Gallery, carefully placed lights create shadows to complete the drawings. The scored lines can be almost imperceptible or dramatically textured. Misplaced lines are as valid as accurately placed lines. Portions of the paper fall off and are lost. Material failure or lack of accuracy allows for difference.

If there is an image at all, it is the scored line and square.

The square references the white cube of the gallery, which was built to exhibit finished product rather than the leftover residue of ongoing actions. van der Stelt’s impulse is to make the cube change-able, shifting, transient. The drawings are an attempt to place the cube in dialogue and alteration. van der Stelt muses: The repetition of scoring and folding creates a time and space for reflecting on assumptions as they relate to aesthetics, art production, and labor. What variables are revealed through slight alteration of movement/choice within the constraints of score and fold? How do whiteness and shadow shift toward something new? How might drawing extend past paper? What happens to the cube through these specific actions as it relates to the grid? How is it possible to fully leave the image behind for a more deliberate investigation of form through light and shadow. Finally, how can the works on paper both reference and critique the limitations of the gallery as an idealized white cube?

Score and Fold: Cube in Process, 2012 paper 56” x 56”

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Paper Shapers Jaime Bennati Joe Cypressi Elizabeth Dove Scott Hazard

Jason Hughes Leslie Shellow Renee van der Stelt

January 31 – March 4, 2012 artists’ Reception

Friday, March 2, 2012, 6-8 p.m. (artist talk at 7 p.m.)

The Silber Gallery

Goucher College Athenaeum Directions

Gallery Hours

Baltimore Beltway, I-695, to exit 27A. Make first left onto campus.

11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Tuesday – Sunday 410.337.6477

The Silber Gallery is free and open to the public.

www.goucher.edu/silber

12333-J1002 12/11

The Silber Gallery program is funded with the assistance of grants from the Maryland State Arts Council, an agency funded by the state of Maryland and the NEA, and the Baltimore County Commission on the Arts and Sciences.