The Possibilities of Paper

Elizabeth Alexander uses cast paper and common household materials to unpack the social, cultural, and psychological implications of the American ideals of domesticity, success, and safety. Raised in a working-class household, Alexander was encouraged to see the possibility in thrown-away objects, leading her to discover what she would later call “the complex nature of dissecting objects of nostalgia.” Her domestic environment acted as a microcosm of human ingenuity. Every curtain sewn by her mother, metal furniture made by her father, even a dollhouse made of old bookshelves, ultimately inspired her working methods as an artist. 

In Welder’s Daughter: The Waiting Room, Alexander addresses her personal background against the collective grief of the COVID crisis in 2020. Setting the domestic stage, the artist presents an opulent damask wallpaper, hand-patterned with rusted and glued iron filings collected from her parents’ metal work. The wallpaper is punctuated by elaborate helmets resembling those used by welders yet also evokes the broader concept of personal protective equipment (PPE) and its outsize role during pandemic. In front of this tableau, an extensive array of hand-cast paper tools, symbolizing the physical labor and craftsmanship at the core of the artist’s family life, sits on a table. Merging public and private, The Welder’s Daughter offers a lens through which to consider the way individuals are shaped by their homes and the activity within them. 

Elizabeth Alexander holds degrees in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy (MFA) and Massachusetts College of Art (BFA). She is currently on the faculty at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA.

Jaq Belcher explores energy, consciousness, light, and form through drawing on paper with a blade. She uses an X-acto knife to hand-cut “seeds” from single sheets of paper to make beautiful patterns, raising or folding the cut pieces to accentuate the design. The seeds often take the shape of the vesica piscis, an almond-like form created by the intersection of two discs with the same radius, important in sacred geometry. They are either completely excised from the sheet, or left attached by a corner or small arc, then raised to catch light and form shadow. Each cut is accounted for and the final count is noted at the base of each work alongside three dates: the date the underlying drawing was started, the date the last cut was made, and the date the work was completed.

Belcher has recently begun to create ephemeral, site-specific installations using the “seeds” (the excised pieces of paper) from her work to compose intricate mandalas on the floor that only exist for the length of an exhibition. The large-scale work from which the seeds were born hangs above the mandala on the floor. The repurposing of these “scraps” is another way Belcher explores reincarnation and the transfer of energy in her work.

The artist’s influences are numerous, ranging from Eastern and Western meditation practices (especially Taoist neidan or inner alchemy) to cosmology, numerology, and the study of sacred geometry. Originally trained as a sculptor, Belcher turned to paper as her preferred medium upon moving to New York City, as she prioritized simplicity, stillness, and focus in her studio practice.

A native of Australia, Belcher received her BA from Melbourne University and an MA in arts administration from the University of New South Wales, College of Fine Arts. She has also studied gold and silversmithing at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She is currently based in Woodstock, NY.

Texas-born artist Roberto Benavidez reimagines a time-honored artistic form typically associated with Mexican culture: the piñata. Usually crafted from paper and commonly associated with festive occasions, piñatas typically signify joy, release, and celebration. For Benavidez, however, the form has become a vehicle for exploring art history as well as race, sexuality, sin, humor, ephemerality, and beauty.

Conflating the sacred and the profane, the everyday and the extraordinary, humor and pathos, Benavidez’s piñatas reimagine and reinvigorate a beloved folk art form. His meticulously crafted paper piñatas are inspired by other works of art. Benevidez’s “Bosch Beasts” series draws upon the fanciful creatures that roam Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights, the early 16th-century Netherlandish masterpiece in the collection of the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain. Benavidez’s works are beamed fromBosch’s religious masterpiece into contemporary art by way of Mexican folk tradition, and in the process are transformed from two-dimensional painted images to minutely detailed paper sculptures. In addition to mining Bosch, Benavidez turned to the elaborate illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages for his “Illuminated Piñata” series. Medieval handwritten religious manuscripts were often embellished with intricate borders or “inhabited initials” that often included fanciful creatures. Centuries later, Benavidez has reincarnated these creatures as piñatas.

Now based in Los Angeles, Benevidez continues to mine the possibilities of the piñatas and the underlying themes of race and transgression he detects within it, mediated by his identity as a mixed-race queer artist with a focus on impeccable craftsmanship. 

As an artist, Doug Beube is drawn to paper in a form most of us are familiar with: a book or “codex.” Beginning in the late 1970s, Beube began changing the structure of the book by challenging its physical properties — piercing, gouging and excavating it — ”as if it were a thrilling, previously undiscovered site in an archeological dig,” according to the artist. Beube’s goal is to transform how the outdated technology known as the book can become something that is new and visually meaningful. 

Beube transforms the shapes of found and discarded books with various tools like scroll saws, belt sanders, and drills. Additionally he collages or excavates books using a surgeon’s knife to painstakingly carve out text. The artist uses his tools like drawing implements, making marks by grinding, gouging, or digging at paper surfaces. This reductive practice allows the content of books to be uncovered in a non-linear way, upending the way a book, as a utilitarian object, is typically consumed. The artist also applies functions from the digital realm such as cutting, pasting, and hidden text to the pre-digital platform of the book. With a practice spanning collage, mixed media, sculpture, photography, and stop-motion animation, Doug Buebe produces work that engages themes including climate change, social justice, and geo-politics.

Born in Ontario, Canada, Beube holds an MFA in photography from SUNY Rochester and a BFA in filmfrom York University in Toronto. 

In February of 2013, in the space of two weeks, Charles Clary lost both his mother and father to smoking-related cancers. The artist channeled his resulting grief, overlaid with nostalgia and childhood trauma,into his artistic practice. By using paper as a medium, he was able to draw a correlation between the fragility and rigidity of the medium and that of the precariousness of life. Each multi-layered opening in his work evokes a beautiful scar, signifying the remnants of past trauma as well as a reminder that with time, all things heal.

In his most recent work, Clary explores the use of drywall and discarded wallpaper in his quest to seek order from chaos, beauty from destruction, and hope from despair. By layering hand-cut paper within segments of wall, the artist builds complex formations that evoke viral colonies and concentric sound waves. These strange landmasses contaminate and infest the surfaces they inhabit, transforming the space into something suitable for their gestation. The ominous nature of this work is offset by a bright, garish color scheme as well as elaborate and nostalgic frames reminiscent of homey domestic environments.

Charles Clary received his BFA in painting from Middle Tennessee State University and his MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in Conway, South Carolina, where he is Associate Professor of Studio Art and Foundations Coordinator at Coastal Carolina University.

Canadian artist Myriam Dion’s art is marked by an attention to ornament and pattern, delicacy and craftsmanship. In her paper-based practice, she is committed to restoring the dignity of traditional manual work, revaluing the essence of labor, and singing the praises of craftsmanship. The slow, focused attention of her practice stands in contrast to Western society’s increasingly frenetic pace and sense of transience. 

The artist’s Jardins (Gardens) series began with the acquisition of old books on botany and gardens, giving rise to two subsets of works. The first, made by meticulously cutting and collaging pages fromold botanical books, follows the principles of 18th-century French “domino paper,” characterized by floral motifs created using woodblock printing with painted or stenciled color. Dion’s translation of this tradition integrates illustrations of plant specimens in the foreground, arranged in a grid that creates a series of zones, flowerbeds and paths, while the background features meticulously-cut openwork that amplifies the composition’s geometry.

The second subset of the Jardins series offers the viewer a more fluid and abstract body of work that illustrates a variety of painstaking paper art techniques, including weaving, cut paper, and collage. Utilizing pieces of Japanese paper that the artist embellished with painting and drawing, this seriesexpresses Dion’s own visual and literary ideation of gardens. She observes: “To fully experience a garden, the walker must slow their pace, wander without a precise itinerary, get lost, until their mind wandersfreely, out of time, leading them to perceive the poetic reality of the universe around them.”

Myriam Dion lives and works in Montreal where she is represented by Galerie Blouin-Division.She graduated from the MFA program at University of Quebec in Montreal.

Samuelle Green’s enveloping, monumental paper installations highlight complex but frequently overlooked structures in the natural world such as bird and wasp nests, beehives, spider webs, rock formations, anthills, and the like. Inspired by these complex organic forms, Green begins her work by establishing a basic structure and adopting self-imposed parameters loosely representing natural laws. She then embellishes these structures with paper elements that repeat and propagate until an independent organic form emerges, free of both literal and metaphorical scaffolding.

Known for creating paper caves and undulating immersive environments, Green crafts her installations from thousands of pages of cast-off books, hand-rolled and fixed into a sculpted wire mesh. Site-specific and built in situ by the artist, Green’s work grows and manifests in its gallery space, referencing the natural structures that inspire the artist while encouraging further contemplation of their beauty and ingenuity. 

Raised in rural Pennsylvania, Samuelle Green attended the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and Parsons School of Design in New York, from which she earned a BFA. She lived and worked in Brooklyn, New York, for eighteen years before relocating to her hometown near Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she is currently based.

The erosion of cultures has been a consistent theme in Guy Laramée’s artistic practice for over two decades. Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. The notion that booksprinted on paper may be an artifact of a fading culture, or that libraries are obsolete, is a natural outgrowth of Laramée’s ongoing interest in seismic cultural shifts. The artist’s work suggests that knowledge gained through books may very well be in a state of erosion rather than accumulation.

In carving landscapes out of antiquated books, or painting them on their surfaces, Laramée transforms mountains of neglected or antiquated knowledge into the physical representation of mountains. These metaphorical mountains erode and become hills, which later flatten into fallow fields. Obsolete encyclopedias and art history textbooks exist purely as physical objects, devoid of the ability to impart further knowledge. Fogs and clouds painted by the artist erase knowledge, pulling the viewer into a thick “cloud of unknowing.” Guy Laramée has been working with books as a sculptural medium for over twenty years. His constructed landscapes, depicting desert valleys, lush mountain ranges, and remote plains, reflect his personal travels. Laramée often works with old dictionaries and encyclopedias, and has spoken of the tension he wishes to explore between static forms of knowledge—represented by these beautiful yet often dated volumes—and the wonder and immediacy of our relationship to the natural world.

Guy Laramée received an MA in visual arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal as well as an MA in anthropology from Concordia University, Montreal. He is based between Canada and Brazil.

Just as the COVID pandemic was beginning, Rosa Leff quit her job as a kindergarten teacher to becomea full-time artist. Inspired by her love of papel picado (cut paper), a folk art technique practiced throughout Mexico, she secured an artist travel award to study in that country. She was further emboldened by her youthful experiences making paintings alongside her grandmother and watching her father build reproduction antique furniture. Leff was raised to see no distinction between fine art and craft. What mattered was that things were made by hand and done well. 

Each of Leff’s works is meticulously cut by hand from a single sheet of paper using an X-ACTO knife. Each piece is unique and can take up to one hundred hours to complete. Her urban landscapes are based on photos she takes in places she has lived—Philadelphia, Baltimore, Puerto Rico—as well as cities she has visited all over the world. ​​ The artist has said, “I want to celebrate the mundane, all the places we pass on the way to and from the things we think are important. I cut all the tiny details (the cracks in the sidewalks, the stickers on the side of a parking meter, the tossed beer can) because that’s part of what makes a city feel like itself.” While Leff is best known for her urban landscapes, she also makes use of mundane media like paper plates and paper towels, transforming these ordinary materials into art while referencing a legacy of domestic craft and handiwork. 

Rosa Leff holds a BA in art history and Spanish from Sarah Lawrence College and an MS in elementaryeducation from the University of Pennsylvania. The artist currently resides in Puerto Rico with herhusband and pet chihuahuas.

Representing the universe in painting, drawing, and sculpture has been John Noestheden’s primary artistic focus for the past fifteen years. His works are informed by all manner of cosmological documents: NASA photographs, false color imaging, historical and contemporary astronomers’ drawings, notations of celestial events, and varieties of star arrangements. 

His “Diamond Drawings” series, featuring Swarovski crystals on Arches paper, has been ongoing for the past twenty years. The arrangements of the crystals on the paper surface evokes patterns that reference chaos theory as well as star formations and astronomical charts and maps. These “drawings” address the age-old question of chaos versus order. How much does an artist control, or conversely, acquiesce to the randomness and uncertainty of creation? How much of the universe itself is a product of random chaos,or intentional order?

Produced through a complex manipulation of control and chance, these compositions are initiallydeveloped through random dispersion of the crystal elements onto the surface of the paper through vibration. The stones are further manipulated by controlled interference and manual meddling such as gathering, clustering, and edging. Each crystal is then carefully glued to the surface of the paper, which now represents the vastness of space itself. 

Noestheden has also combined “Diamond Drawings” with techniques used in his “Breath Drawings”— works in which horizontal lines are drawn from one edge of the paper to the other in the space of a single breath. These works, such as 1476 Breaths, knit together the intimate rhythms of the body with the majesty of cosmological scale.

John Noestheden was born in Amsterdam in 1945 and moved to Canada in 1952. He received a BFA from the University of Windsor and an MFA from Tulane University, New Orleans. 

Matt Shlian works in the realm between art and science, guided by wonder and rooted in print media, book arts, and design. His sculptural forms are inspired by organic material and iterative patterns, each piece mapped out digitally and then folded and assembled by hand. After beginning his career inceramics, Shlian became interested in dissecting pop-up books, which soon led him to devote himself to becoming a “paper engineer.”

Each of Shlian’s works begins with a systematized folding process; for example, only using curved foldsor restricting himself to a certain angle. Beginning with an initial fold, a single action causes a transferof energy to subsequent folds, and upon countless repetitions of this process, a three-dimensional formis manifested. Chance and happy accidents play a significant role within Shlian’s practice, as does a sense of openness to the way that a whole emerges from the repetition of particulars. Shlian aligns himself with the roles of the scientist as a collaborator, explorer, and inventor, and draws significant inspiration from scientific inquiry. The artist’s engineering skills have led to collaborations with scientists at the University of Michigan. 

Matt Shlian finds inspiration in diverse disciplines ranging from art to medicine to science, including solar cell design, protein misfolding, Islamic tile patterning, systematic drawing, architecture, biomimetics, and music. He resides in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and holds a BFA from Alfred University and an MA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.

Eric Standley builds intricate, imagined cut-paper “artifacts” using vector-based software and CNCmachines. He begins by drawing individual two-dimensional layers using a gaming mouse and design software. This labor-intensive process can take months or even years to complete. Each layer is then laser-cut and carefully coordinated to create complex three-dimensional compositions. Standley’s technology-infused studio practice enables him to create elaborate works with a precision often reserved for industry, mass production, and scientific research.

Standley’s art is heavily influenced by patterns and both the scientific and philosophical theoriespertaining to them. Fractal geometry, the study of infinitely complex patterns that are self-similaracross different scales, from molecular to cosmic, is one important source of inspiration. Other key influences include Gothic and Islamic architectural ornamention, which Standley perceives as an attempt to capture reverence for the infinite through design. The artist also identifies patterns in mythologies, rituals of faith, and sacred objects that influence the mysterious, magnificent objects he creates. Informed by pattern-based interpretations, Standley’s works explore the intricacy, fragility, and vulnerability shared across all life forms.

Eric Standley received a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and an MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. He resides in Blacksburg, Virginia, where he serves as Professor of Studio Art at Virginia Tech.

Utilizing paper, an innately delicate and commonplace material, Michael Velliquette makes intricately constructed sculptures and installations that convey strength, intent, and durability. Velliquette challenges the unassuming nature of paper by creating pieces that are dimensional, elaborate, and timeless—in which temporality and perpetuity coexist. 

Velliquette’s works are cut and assembled exclusively by hand, a laborious process that becomes a meditative exercise for the artist as the sculpture is built incrementally with a range of simple tools. Through a meticulous and intuitive process of measuring, cutting, and assembling paper into complex structures and geometric systems, the artist imbues a simple material with the power to transfix. Velliquette is well known for his intricate, three-dimensional sculptures representing fantastic, imagined architectural structures. 

Very early in his career, Velliquette experimented with creating mobiles. For this exhibition, the artist returns to the concept of suspended work, creating a large hanging installation of pristine white paper sculptures. The massing of these simple forms, hand-cut by the artist in a wide variety of repetitive patterns, results in a kind of fantastic paper forest which is bisected to create immersive access for the viewer.  

Michael Velliquette received his BFA from Florida State University and his MA and MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Velliquette is Assistant Professor of Foundations in the Art Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.