Elizabeth Gregory-Gruen, Cut Work: A Survey 2008–2018 by Modern IDENTITY Inc.

Cut Work: A Survey 2008-2018 Howl Happening: An Arturo Vega Project

Cut Work: A Survey 2008-2018 March 21â&#x20AC;&#x201C;April 14, 2019 Howl Happening: An Arturo Vega Project HOWL! A/P/E Volume 1, No. 30

1 - Tri-Color #2, 2009 Freehand-cut cotton rag paper 34 1/2 x 27 inches

2 - Black & White Flip Circle — In, 2015 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board 23 x 19 inches 3 - Black & White Flip Circle — Out, 2015 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board 23 x 19 inches 4 - Cobalt Mirror — Out, 2010 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board, gouache paint 34 x 24 inches 5 - Cobalt Mirror — In, 2010 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board, gouache paint 34 x 24 inches

FIELDS OF INVENTION BY MICHELLE GRABNER With openness and heightened receptivity, Elizabeth GregoryGruen manifests hard-edged, optically splendid composition—a type of universal archeology. Deploying a surgical scalpel, she removes a matrix of interrelated abstract shapes from a sheet of paper. Another piece of paper is then adhered to the back of the first cut layer. Steadily and with a free hand Gregory-Gruen cuts through the second layer of paper…then a third, a fourth…. The cuts are made just inside the contours of the previous cuts. This process builds a reverse relief—like an excavation giving way to linear patterns and intimate architectural spaces that change with light and shadow. Utilizing the paper shapes cut from the negative compositions, Elizabeth then constructs a positive complement. Stacking and adhering the cutout pieces together—in the same order excised from the original —a convex form emerges with its anatomy extending outward. Color patterns are reversed, but the design scheme is retained. The visual motifs range from bold to subtle, basic to complex, balanced to discordant. What stays constant among these fields of invention is a heightened awareness of abstract vocabulary and its ability to yield unexpected originality. Pushing the limitations of formal and material constraints, the language of contemporary imagemaking is stretched. Optical, painterly, symbolic, and decorative, all 23 pieces in Cut Work: A Survey 2008-2018 foreground difference and discovery. The exhibition’s structure celebrates the varying organizing principles that make up the artist’s 10-year lexicon. At its heart, the exhibition reveals purposeful visual creation threading through the relational elements of symmetry and contrast, repetition and form, and similarity and variance. Attention and concentration are also subjects. From a starting composition that defies rules and strategy to a rigorous technique that requires controlling the movement and pressure of a sharp blade, Gregory-Gruen’s process and labor draw attention to focus and the rejection of diversion. It is here the work gives itself over to urgent cultural commentary. The seductive graphic qualities of the work reveal slight imper-

fections, human flaws reminding us that hand and mind are immediate and present in the making of each composition. No computer interface takes on a task in production. Beyond highlighting the integrity of craft, Gregory-Gruen’s cut-paper work addresses the conditions of time, attention, and imagination in our culture of distraction. She not only enacts the freedoms that allow her to tackle the technical and temporal aspects of paper cutting, but celebrates the meaningful conditions afforded by that freedom. The formal elements of the compositions speak to the political implications of patterning, shape, and arrangement. The literary critic Caroline Levine reminds us that form is always about order, and order is always political. She writes, “forms can be at once containing, plural, overlapping, portable, and situated.” Gregory-Gruen’s compositions give prominence to the potential interpretations of formal vocabulary. For example, the white monochrome Circle—In (2014) employs stable geometry as a vessel for pulsating twists and folds—a metaphor that can be applied to the politics of all sorts of social institutions. In the works Peace—In and Peace—Out (both 2010) Gregory-Gruen gives three-dimensionality to a familiar cultural symbol—breathing new life into a clichéd sign with brilliant orange gouache, concentric lines, and topographical abstractions. Cut aluminum and leather also enter the artist’s material language. The precision of the cut metal offers machined perfection and timelessness, while the leather work evokes a soft vulnerability that succumbs to the contours of geometric forms. The cut-paper work lacerated with a 12-gauge shotgun yields a disruptive index both violent and baroque. Working in the lineage of Niki de Saint Phalle, Elizabeth’s gunshot work also engages the powerful forces of firearms as a means to conjuring beauty. The woolly pulp of the paper and the uncontrolled gesture stand in contrast with the hard-cut edge of the surgical knife and image invention, suggesting a generous compositional muchness instead of a violation. The entirety of Cut Work: A Survey 2008-2018 magically dances between radically seductive relief work and an attentively orientated human process. Taken together, the work is a manifestation of universal completeness.

6 - Leather 4-Piece Gunshot, 2010 Freehand-cut lambskin with 12-gauge shotgun blast 28 x 21 inches 7 - Gunshot #3, 2018 Freehand-cut cotton rag paper with 12-gauge shotgun blast 63 1/2 x 44 inches

8 - Gunshot One, 2018 Freehand-cut blotter-cotton board with 12-gauge shotgun blast 18 x 15 inches 9 - Gunshot Two, 2018 Freehand-cut blotter-cotton board with 12-gauge shotgun blast 18 x 15 inches 10 - Gunshot Three, 2018 Freehand-cut blotter-cotton board with 12-gauge shotgun blast 18 x 15 inches 11 - Gunshot Four, 2018 Freehand-cut blotter-cotton board with 12-gauge shotgun blast 18 x 15 inches

12 - Red & White Flip Circle - In, 2015 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board, gouache paint 23 x 19 inches 13 - Red & White Flip Circle - Out, 2015 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board, gouache paint 23 x 19 inches 14 - Peace - Out, 2010 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board, gouache paint 34 x 24 inches 15 - Peace - In, 2010 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board, gouache paint 34 x 24 inches

16 - Silver - In, 2012 Laser-cut painted aluminum with folded edge 30 x 30 inches 17 - Blue - In, 2012 Laser-cut painted aluminum with folded edge 30 x 30 inches

INCISE MATTERS CARLO McCORMICK To find that better place—some ideal between serenity and happiness as Elizabeth Gregory-Gruen seeks in her art—is it a matter of building up or excavating? Perhaps that is the ingenuity and inspiration of Gruen’s art; it is at once a construction and a reduction, approximate in this way to both the creative and spiritual process. As a deft confluence of heart and hand, it speaks to and for both these dimensions and serves each as a kind of pathway, a journey of discovery into the self and all that we call—for lack of a better understanding —the unknown. Gorgeous, mesmerizing, and any number of other over-the-top adjectives we might conjure to try to articulate something more said by ‘wow,’ Gregory-Gruen slips so easily around and outside the domain of the sublime with a visual language that belies the spectacular sum effect: employing materiality, formalism, design, and craft to produce something that has a lot less to do with its methodology or architecture than a sense of magic and awe. These are the patterns of confluence and interference at the heart of being, the fearful symmetry (as Blake called it) through which the visionary reveals meaning. Deeply organic to its core yet fully (wo)manmade, here for a change is abstraction without all the rhetoric, a kind of spellbinding emptiness that is rich, readable, and recognizable. Built in our world of borders, an accumulation of boundaries, it flows within these constraints as the geometry of an in-between, the interstice of being there where nonspecific spaces flow. Elizabeth told us that with her art she is trying to create “a place to rest and meditate.” Indeed, it is a kind of topographical audacity for these frenetic times, an idle to the busy and idyll to the turmoil, a contemplation in the age of distraction like a Zen garden built in the middle of the information superhighway. A calm in the storm, it is a stillness meant to evoke movement, a meditation for the restless mind. Gruen’s constellations, radiant and animate, dance and dive through the amassing of subtle difference in the spirit of the very best minimalist compositions. Built up like some gradual sedimentary accrual, tracings of form that trace the genesis of new life as if by mitosis, there is no die- or laser-cut way to get

here, just the systematic assembly of as many as 50 sheets of paper each individually cut freehand in call and response to the other. The result as she sees it is something that can “move and change over time as if it’s alive.” It’s a burrowing inwards, cut by cut, that conversely gathers an accretion in the manner of an escalation, a butterfly effect in which minor variance results in dramatic difference, a digging down to rise up where mounting and descent work in tandem to create a unity of contrary motions. Here the mirror shimmers, each gesture in concert with its neighbor, a chorus forever wavering off register along a chord of harmonic grace. It’s an extended echo that gathers resonance like a feedback loop, never preconceived but rather found along the way, a destination unknown. For Gregory-Gruen, that unfolding of the undisclosed is the mode of discovery where entropy is the mutable force of change. Because it is cumulate, the record of what was taken away in what remains, her art is durational as time itself. “It takes the serene to the unknown,” she explained, “it constantly disrupts the symmetry, just like life—how order just gets blown apart over time, that whole experience.” A 10-year survey spanning 2008 to 2018—though consistent with a lifetime’s work that runs from the obsessive cuttings of her teens through a long tenure in New York’s fashion industry (where the first step of cut and sew is the production of forms called cuttings) to her ongoing studio practice—allows us to get some measure of the material evolution within her proscribed process. Something of a greatest hits record from an act that remains yet a discovery, it includes a progression into complexity bound in a discipline of simplicity, the introduction of color where vibrancy acts as a punctuation for a devilishly inexact uniformity, and blasted paperscapes of her shotgun pieces and experiments in metal where her poetic sense of the ephemeral found home in the monumental. Such a show at this time is, in the artist’s mind, the kind of summation one takes before moving on, but where the work will go from here we’d not hazard to guess. What can be sure is that wherever her art moves from here it will take us along with it, pulling at the blinkered eyes and dragging along even the most reluctant mind with the urgency of its multidirectional imperative.

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Priapus, Will You Be My Girlfriend?, 2019 Acrylic on canvas 114 x 120 inches

18 - Circle - In, 2014 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board 25 x 20 1/2 inches 19 - Free Form - In, 2014 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board 25 x 20 1/2 inches 20 - Free Form #1, 2009 Freehand-cut cotton rag paper 47 1/2 x 33 1/2 inches

21 - Free Form #2, 2009 Freehand-cut cotton rag paper 63 x 43 inches From the estate of Arturo Vega and Howl! Happening: an Arturo Vega Project 22 - All Over Blue Grey Blend, 2018 Freehand-cut silk-screened 2-ply museum board 24 x 20 inches

HOWL! COMMUNITY Arturo Vega Foundation Lalo Quiñones Jane Friedman Donovan Welsh BG Hacker BOARD OF ADVISORS Dan Cameron Curt Hoppe Carlo McCormick Marc H. Miller Maynard Monrow Lisa Brownlee James Rubio Debora Tripodi Howl! Board of Directors Bob Perl, President Bob Holman, Vice President BG Hacker, Treasurer Nathaniel Siegel, Secretary Riki Colon Jane Friedman Chi Chi Valenti Marguerite Van Cook, President Emeritus

Elizabeth Gregory-Gruen Cut Work: A Survey 2008-2018 Published on the occasion of the exhibition March 21–April 14, 2019 Howl! Happening: An Arturo Vega Project © 2019 Howl Arts, Inc. Howl! Archive Publishing Editions (Howl! A/P/E) Volume 1, No. 30 ISBN: 978-1-7338785-0-0 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of Howl! A/P/E. © 2019 Michelle Grabner © 2019 Carlo McCormick

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Front cover: Circle — In, 2014 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board 25 x 20 1/2 inches Back cover: Circle — Out, 2014 Freehand-cut 2-ply museum board 25 x 20 1/2 inches From the Howl! Arts Collection