The Weight of Paper
Lori Brown, Irene Chan, Seong Chun, Christine Conley, Gwendolyn A. English, Don Estes, Jil Evans, Jason Manley, Suzanne Morlock, Keiko Narahashi, Meg Ojala, Suzanne H. Ulrich and Bill Wheelock
Anne Davey , Curator
Davey chose to organize her exhibition around work made on/of or with paper. The show will feature artists from all over the country:
Lori Brown utilizes collage in order to explore ideas through manipulation of conceptual and formal relationships. By using paper she collects from her daily life, the work becomes a marker of time and events. Her materials include found objects, paper, fabric, thread, and wax.
Lori Brown received her B.S. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in 1991 and her Master of Architecture from Princeton in 1994. She currently teaches in the School of Architecture at Syracuse University . Her work has been shown in New York City, Princeton, Atlanta, Boston, and South Carolina .
Irene Chan's work investigates the forces that are the basis of our everyday world. She is interested in patterns and natural phenomena in the cosmic order like growth and decay: things that are in the movement of evolving from or devolving toward nothingness. Based on Taoist thought, her work concerns how we relate to and interact with the environment.
Ms. Chan is a printmaker, papermaker, book artist, and proprietor of Ch'An Press, established in 1995. She is Associate Professor at the University of Maryland , Baltimore County . Her prints, artist books and handmade paper are included in the permanent collections of the new York Public library; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Tate modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Newberry Library in Chicago; the Institute of Paper Science and Technology in Atlanta; and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Seong Chun lives and works in New York City . She received her B.A. from the University of California at San Diego , and her M.A. in Studio Art from New York University . She is interested in experiences of the common as explored through non-traditional art making practices. She challenges definitions of art by re-contextualizing an activity that is craft, such as crochet, within an art vernacular. She will be showing a three-dimensional work of crocheted paper and text at the Delta Axis exhibit. She has shown her work throughou! t the country, including the group exhibition, Blemish , at the Memphis College of Art in 2001.
Christine Conley, a Memphian, is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Mississippi and an Adjunct Professor of Art at The University of Memphis. She has been working from the leftover pieces of paint on her palette, magnifying them significantly, and rendering them in both pencil and paint. For this exhibit she will be showing drawings based on the her daily life.
Gwendolyn A. English is a local printmaker and book artist whose work was included in the 2001 exhibit, The Open Book: A Juried Exhibit of Artists' Books. She received her BFA from Southern Illinois University in 1989, and her MFA from the Memphis College of Art in 1995. The work showcased in this exhibit is drawn from memory, personal history, and the landscape.
Don Estes will be showing drawings based on work he did during an artist residency in Torroella De Montgris, Spain in 2003. He is director of Second Floor Contemporary, a non-commercial art space he established in 1999. He is also one of the original founders of Number: A Quarterly of Visual Arts. Graduating from The University of Memphis with his MFA in painting in 1981, his recent work has been focused on painting, drawing and printmaking. His paintings were featured in New American Paintings in 2003.
Jil Evans, a painter and printmaker from Minneapolis , will be showing large monoprints (40" x 59 1/2") based on studies she made while looking at the upper structural components of the Mall of America. She received her MFA from Stanford University in 1985, and an MA in painting from the University of Iowa in 1983. Her museum exhibitions include the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Halle Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon, the Musee-atelier ADZAQK, Paris, France, and the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, MN. She has also had solo exhibitions in Minneapolis , New York City, Chicago , Washington D.C.
Jason Manley's mixed media works are wall-mounted, painting/sculpture hybrids. They map the terrain of ambiguous forms, suggestive of both the body and the earth. He is a currently an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona . He has shown his work at the Museum of Fine Arts , Santa Fe ; the University of Long Beach , Long Beach , CA ; and the Kansas Union Art Gallery in Lawrence KS .
Suzanne Morlock, an artist from Wyoming , will be showing sculptural works made from paper. These sculptures investigate interior and exterior space. Small and intimate in scale, they combine paper with tacks, string, felt, and even dryer lint. She has shown her work in Wyoming , Colorado . Montana . In 2003 she received a fellowship to Anderson Ranch in CO, and in 2005 she will have an exhibition at Museum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland .
Keiko Narahashi graduated with her MFA from Bard College in 1999. She lives and works in New York City . The work she will show at Delta Axis are wall-mounted constructions of gesso, acrylic, parchment, muslin, polystyrene and other media. Drawn to the edges of things, ideas, and places , she uses the conventions of painting - light, color, and form, in different contexts (on shaped canvases, on the wall, in assemblages), to explore these places and ideas and the longing they provoke.
Meg Ojala teaches photography at St. Olaf College in Minnesota . She received her MFA from The Art institute of Chicago . She makes drawings as well as photographs and for the last several years her work has focused on the natural world. For this exhibit, she will show two large photographs printed on drawing paper. These works are as much about the paper they are printed on as they are about the images they represent.
Suzanne H. Ulrich, an artist based in Marblehead, MA, will be showing works in collage. Her methods include cutting, tearing, painting and pasting paper in fairly small formats. She is represented by Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston, O.K. Harris in NYC, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts in NYC, and Hidell Brooks Gallery in Charlotte , North Carolina .
Bill Wheelock is an artist and writer who completed his undergraduate sculpture degree from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1991. His works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum , the Fogg Museum and the RISD Museum . He has written art criticism for two Los Angeles based Magazines: ArtUS and X-Tra. Following a fascination with objects becoming increasingly out of focus, Wheelock's work includes photographs, prints, and various attempts to make "blurry" sculpture. More recently he has been experimenting with text.