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Glenn Ligon, Self-Portrait at Eleven Years Old,
cotton base sheet with stenciled pulp painting

Material Assumptions: Paper as Dialogue
june 15 - August 11, 2012

friday, june 15

OPENING RECEPTION: 4:00–7:00 p.m.

ROUNDTABLE:
Group Effort: Hand Papermaking, Collaboration, and Contemporary Art
6:30–8:00 p.m.

Curated by Jessica Cochran, with Elizabeth Isakson-Dado, Hannah King, and C.J. Mace

This exhibition is about the discursive ways that artists approach paper as a medium, technology, and tool. Hand papermaking is a process that begins with the raw material of pulp and ends in sculpture, mixed media, and installation. To that end, this exhibition asks us to consider the utility of paper at the site of interdisciplinary contemporary arts and crafts.

For the exhibition, we asked contemporary artists to create new work using abaca and cotton paper handmade to their specifications at the Center for Book and Paper Arts by graduate students. In doing so, we are prompting a conversation concerning not only the paper itself, but each artists' own creative processes and studio practices: does a new material complicate the artist’s way of making, thinking or working?

A second part of the exhibition features works created by artists in-residence at Dieu Donné, a New York-based non-profit artist workspace dedicated to the creation, promotion and preservation of contemporary art in the hand papermaking process. As handmade paper is not a primary material for most artists in the exhibition, their residency afforded them an opportunity to see how handmade paper could work for them in important ways.

To us “handmadeness” points not to a certain aesthetic or visual trope, but to realms of possibility; for example, subtle combinations of texture and color or a deceptively weightless surface—all in service of conceptual gesture and complex, meaningful expression. In other words, the works on view don’t have to tell us explicitly they’re handmade, because we’re already hooked. As such, Material Assumptions calls into question our expectations of handmade paper in terms of its aesthetic and raison d’être, dynamically affirming its relevance as an interdisciplinary and contemporary artistic mode of activity.

  Visit the curatorial and production blog. 

Jessica Stockholder, A Violet Haze. (Pigmented abaca, pulp painting, collage)

Works from Dieu Donné by
Jessica Stockholder
Glenn Ligon
Richard Tuttle
Chuck Close
Polly Apfelbaum
Sonya Blesofsky
Mel Bochner
Ian Cooper
William Kentridge
Beth Campbell
Nina Bovasso

Newly commissioned works by
Dan Devening
Deborah Boardman
Ian Schneller
Annica Cuppetelli & Cristobal Mendoza
Matthew Shlian
Kate McQuillen
Niall McClelland
Anna Tsantir
Daniel Luedtke
Zoe Nelson
Julie Schenkelberg
Susan Goethel-Campbell