Waterlines installation at Works Gallery

I have a new installation up at Works Gallery in San Jose, as part of Eco Echo: Unnatural Selection. See the press release here. Here's a sneak peek! Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Win Win 4 at NIAD

NIAD Art Center has a benefit to support their programs every year, called Win Win. Since they started four years ago, I've donated every year. Not only is it a great cause to support, the chance to do these little experiments each spring always really opens up some ideas that find ways into my current work in progress. This year was no exception.

Actually, I think I like these more than any other year. The pieces are called Distance I-III, with I above and II and III in descending order below. Click on the images for a larger viewing size.

NIAD has some great exhibitions coming up - including a show curated by Robert in March, and a solo show by yours truly in their Annex Gallery in June!

New Print and collaboration about Pluto!

As a usual gap in blogging indicates, a whirlwind of activities happened. I need to sit down and really do a couple of posts about the time at Banff, but because it was just SO MUCH I need to process a bit.

So to get back into the rhythm of blogging, I'm writing today about my recently finished print for the Pluto Print Exchange that Mandy organized. Robert and I ended up collaborating on our piece, and we didn't end up killing each other! (I find it odd that as frequently as I collaborate with others - Marie, Mary, Anne - this was my first time with my husband).

With all the new images of Pluto from New Horizons, I started looking at images of Pluto from mythology, particularly in printed matter. Robert and I both ended up being drawn to this image by Hendrick Goltzius.

Our original intent was to combine the historic and the most recent scientific, perhaps in a sort of like Vitruvian Man. However, the idea developed through our love and respect for papercutting to incorporate that technique. We were also inspired by Allison Smith's Pitcher Collection, and how isolating an image from context makes it both more playful and yet gives it a certain presence.

Using some of the leftover Sekishu from my Small Plates residency (thanks SFCB!) we digitally printed (with archival inks) some images of Pluto's surface. I carved a block based on Goltzius's Pluto (above, inked) which was then printed onto the Sekishu.

The prints were then cut out of the Sekishu.

(I have to confess, the whole time I was cutting these, I kept thinking about this post from The Toast, and the line, GET THIS ARSE.)

Finally, the cut out images were chine colle'd to Rives BFK.

Click on the images for larger views.

The print needs to be properly documented, still. Next spring, the entire portfolio will be exhibited at UArts in the Printmaking Gallery. Artists from Oakland (me), Seattle, Iowa, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia participated. I've yet to see the rest of the portfolio, but have heard good things about the other pieces - trying to be patient but very excited!

Between the dense and the distilled...

As I've been working on these recent collages, it's come to me that as an artist, my studio practice has frequently swung between highly detailed, dense works, and very minimal, materially sensitive, distilled pieces. With these collages, with their layers of printed imagery and cut paper, things feel like I'm currently in a dense stage.

Click on images for larger view.

It's interesting, because after spending months and months making pieces like this one, or this, or this, which are basically just paper, these collages come together in a matter of hours at most. (Although, if I counted all the time that led to the waste prints and paper that went into assembling the collage, it would be much, much longer). Of course, the paper portfolios are also editions, while the collages are unique works.

I think most artists who have made minimal work that is similar to my linked examples will agree that the precision required to work on something that is so exacting and simple is often as equally challenging to produce as something complex and highly detailed. There's just no wiggle room.

However, I find myself wondering what these divergent methods mean to my overall practice. I keep coming back to the concept of distilling when I think of the paper portfolios - I had clarified my vision and ideas down to a material essence and process. Simultaneously, it's a challenge to myself - how good are my skills? (how much can I show off?) Completing such work honors the medium and its potential.

These collages are more ambiguous - multiple nonlinear narratives colliding, a burgeoning lexicon of imagery.

Right now, after all those months of meticulousness, getting to use all that lovely paper that Jerarde gave me last year, to layer, to delight in my love of pattern, it's a release to embrace complexity. It feels like an indulgence.

"Clarity" at Napa Art on First

Some photos from the opening for Napa's "Art on First" event this week. For the event, artists take over the empty storefronts in downtown Napa, and the installations will be up for the next year, barring any spaces getting rented.

These are shots of my installation, Clarity. The panels are made from Schoenoplectus californicus, better known as tule or California bulrush, harvested from the shores of Winery Lake.

(Click on images for enlargements).

To me, this is an example of how handmade paper art can transcend being just a an art object made in a craft tradition, to becoming site-specific and a form of Land Art. Clarity is made out of the land itself, and is being shown only a few miles from where the plants that it originated from grew.

As I said in my statement, I called the piece Clarity in reference to the "transparency and purity of the Napa River, but also [to suggest] the insight gained when we understand its value." Today, as I look at these photos, I can't help thinking about my conversation earlier this week with Jill about water usage in handmade paper, and how water will play out politics and survival in the future.

I love the Napa Art community, such wonderful, inspiring and amazing folks. Some very sweet friends from Napa told me that this piece was "poetry on paper, in this little context it is a huge continent."

Special thanks goes to the Arts Council of Napa Valley, particularly Christy Bors for all her organizing, and Cohan Sculley, for coordinating installation, general helpfulness, and above all, patience with me as installing dragged on and I kept saying I was almost done....thank you.

Together Again

I just learned yesterday that I will be in an exhibition with my friend and old studio-mate Sun Young Kang! We are going to be part of the exhibition Branching Together, curated by Melanie Mowinski, coming at at PRESS: A Letterpress Public Art Project in North Adams, MA. Unfortunately, I don't think we will physically be able to be there, but I'm sure our spirits will.

Above is Sunny's piece that will be on display, though I believe it will have a different configuration for PRESS, and I will be exhibiting my Ghost Trees. The exhibition will also feature Helen Hiebert's Mother Tree project. Its sure to be an amazing and paper-rific exhibition!

Upcoming Class at Kala

Monoprinting and Pop-Up Engineering with Michelle Wilson at Kala Art Institute, Saturdays, February 4 & 11, 10am-4pm, Tuition $232. In this workshop, students will use learn to incorporate basic monoprinting and pop-up paper engineering techniques to create printed pop-up structures that can be the basis of paper sculptures or artist books. This class is ideal for artists who are interested in ways of taking their two-dimensional work into the third dimension, or teachers who are interested in learning ideas to incorporate into their classroom. No prerequisite required. To register for the class, please visit here. For information on class discounts, please visit here. Questions or to register over the phone, please contact Carrie Hott, Program Coordinator for Artist Residencies and Classes, at carrie@kala.org or call 510-549-2977 ext. 303

Getting It

I had the fortune to be asked by the lovely Nancy Willis to be part of the exhibition Discrepancy, living between war and peace, at the Napa Valley Museum this year. For which, I created the installation above. Titled Power, it is a cast shadow (made from handcut denim paper) of an oil rig.

Nancy said the inspiration for this exhibition was the cognitive dissonance she felt while living in Napa, which if you've never been there, is a helluva GORGEOUS place, and the knowledge that wars and related atrocities were taking place in other parts of the world.

When asked to consider these ideas, I found I wanted to say something about what bridges the gap between American lifestyles and war - our love of fossil fuels, particularly petroleum. I decided that it should take the form of a cast shadow because its ubiquitous presence in everything I do, either in the forms of energy or plastics. It's there, but it so vast and overshadowing that we, as Americans, don't even see it anymore, yet our need for it is enough to send our nation to war in order to control petroleum-rich locations.

At the opening, several people came up to me and mentioned they liked my work, and then asked me what it was about. At least one person said as politely as she could that she didn't get it. On one hand, this says to me that I was spot-on in the omnipresence of petroleum - people can't even see it as an issue. On the other, the artist in me (who has similar conversations very frequently when she is expounding half-formed ideas to Robert), wants to shake them and say, "What's wrong with you?!?!? Don't you get it??!?!" More due to my vanity than any other reason.

I remember in graduate school having a discussion about how, if a viewer didn't understand a work of art, the artist has failed them for not making it clear enough. (I know this opinion differs from a part of the art world that makes work responding to art theory, and so creates pieces that have a certain inscrutability to a large portion of the population who hasn't read the same esoterica). However I couldn't help but wonder what this reaction meant in this situation. Did I fail? Or is my interpretation of the theme just cattywampus to the way most people seem to think? Or is that I was so very spot-on?

The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. In addition, I should add that several people, including Nancy herself, told me that they were glad to see I addressed the issue of petroleum dependance. I'm told that a veteran on a private tour saw my piece, pointed, and said, "That's what it's all about." So it seems I didn't fail all viewers.

As I muddle over these reactions, I can't help wondering what the next incarnation of this piece should be. It seems like just the beginning of a larger exploration.

On a lighter side, I had a small brush with big celebrity during the opening reception. Robert Redford showed up (his wife is one of the artists in the exhibition). Here I am, blushing madly, with him and Kristie Sheppard, the director of the museum.

New artist book and musing on papercutting...

A preview of my most recent work - which I finished editioning this weekend! Only an edition of five, but considering I made the paper, printed each sheet individually (twice!), bound the structure, hand-cut the pages, and built a clamshell for each book, I'd say that's still a fair amount of work. 

The book is called Chacaltaya, and is about the Bolivian glacier that disappeared in 2009 (read more about it here.) It also contains a poem written in Spanish (with translation provided) about the idea of the loss of a glacier, and the loss of the water it represents.

I've been thinking a great deal about my interest in the human-nature interrelationship, and how it is explored in my work. As I've stated before, I see paper, particular plant-made paper, as representative of nature. Whatever I do to it - cutting, shaping, casting, printing, sewing - as the mark of the hand, and therefore the mark of the human. As I was cutting, I started thinking about some of my "human marks" involving piercing or cutting the paper in some way - a means of destroying or altering the paper to get my desired result.

I also started thinking about how piercing the paper, with its pretty obvious sexual connotations, is seen as essentially a "male" action. Which led me to think - is the mark of the human synonymous in our greater society with the mark of the man? If so, what is the mark of the woman? Or is woman the antithesis of this idea, and leaves no mark, therefore invisible? Could I make woman-marks in my work that do not evoke men at all? Or is this all hogwash, and my works are gender neutral?  (According to the Battle of the Sexes tally, I was more male than female, so maybe not). Is the mark of the human gender neutral? We certainly are all, men and women, to blame for the damage we've done to the planet.