I Just Want The Paper

From the curators: "From scribbling down ideas to sketching out first drafts, paper often serves as a foundational wellspring to irrigate many a creative process for artists across different art practices. This is made possible by paper's complex simplicity. It is within this austere space that the very foundation alluded to above can emerge such that paper takes on a potentiality to be explored and transformed in multifaceted approaches. Against this background, I Just Want The Paper is a group exhibit showcasing artists who intimately work with the age-old medium of paper. The artworks in this exhibit can be considered broad and eclectic in technique and scale; however, the process underlying the works coupled with their conveyed imagery intimate at a shared thematic interest in navigating concepts tied to the ambivalent and the ambiguous. This thematic convergence ensures that the plurality of the surveyed works (on paper) speak at times pointedly and at others tacitly to elements of the human experience, including identity formation, self-consciousness, memory, language, and bygone eras, that are wrought with uncertainty. Distilling these complex phenomena through paper encourages reflections on the inventive uses of the medium and, more importantly, repositions the permanence and importance of works on paper to contemporary art discourses. Central to this repositioning is presenting the distinct approaches employed by artists working with and on paper, and juxtaposing their work in the space of the process and imagery that is often imbued with ambivalence. The title of the exhibit acknowledges this ambivalence and takes as its point of departure the observations of visual artist, Gerhard Richter, when discussing his predilection for his works on paper relative to paintings. "Drawing or painting on paper is more impulsive than painting on canvas...I found that the directness of the works on paper led to randomness and virtuosity. I didn't want any of that." This note on "impulsivity" and/or "directness" suggests an immediacy that works on paper occupy, which opens up the artistic medium to questions about meditative representation or the lack thereof. I Just Want The Paper reconstructs this view of directness by offering a sincere read of the self-reflective possibilities of the medium. The artists considered--Stephani Martinez, Suzanne Desbiens, Darrell Kinsel, Susan Goethel Campbell, Gianna Paniagua, Kenturah Davis, and Terry Boyd--satisfy that want or directness by intimately experimenting with paper. At the same time, the selected works also oscillate in the ambiguous amalgam of randomness and virtuosity through a process and imagery that is everything but prosaic. Taken together, I Just Want The Paper exceeds the expectations attributed to works on paper, infusing the medium and the visual read of the works with a process-oriented understanding that can shape the practice of and discourses surrounding works on paper as well as the real-world ambiguities imbued within the medium." The opening reception was held December 6 at 6 pm.