Water Works: Surface Tension,
an exhibition of drawings by Sky Pape that demonstrates once again the
artist’s ability to push the boundaries of the medium, will open at the June
Kelly Gallery on February 5. It will remain
on view through March 9.
Pape creates her drawings by an
unconventional process — working on the floor and blowing ink through tubes
and funnels onto handmade paper from Japan, Korea and Nepal.
“In a sense,” Pape says, “I
breathe life into these drawing, using my lungs to propel the ink.
But as much as they reflect my physical being, biological forms and
systems, they also elicit a broader, innate recognition of the natural
world. Growth and decay, beauty and
brutality are the rudiments of this language. These
forms and lines divulge our connectedness with nature, a reminder of our
shared fragility.”
For Pape, drawing is the core of
any art, and her innovative approach displays both experimentation and
expressiveness. “The idea of drawing with
the paper instead of just upon it is characteristic of my approach to my
materials,” she comments. “I draw upon the
unconscious for forms skimming the surface of recognizability, which act as
a threshold to aspects of individual and contemporary human experience.”
“I use the line as an isolated
gesture with an almost independent presence,” she says.
“I try to integrate the forms with an intuitive energy that
references language – both abstract and minimal. And
I see my work as a collaboration with those distant paper-makers in Asia.”
Pape, a native of Toronto, Canada,
lives and works in New York City. She
studied art at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and at Parsons
School of Design and the Art Students League in New York.
She will spend the month of March on a grant from the
Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy.
She has shown in many solo and
group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her work
is represented in many public and private collections, including the Museum
of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New
York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Santa
Barbara Museum of Art, California, Dyke Industries, Little Rock, Arkansas
and Cirque du Soleil, Montreal, Canada.
