Manifest - PAPERWORKS

Paper is one of the first areas of creative possibility that we encounter.

It is a surface made of pulped cellulose, created to take on marks, incisions, and material. It carries between us our messages, sketches, lists, and sums—all forms of externalized memory, thoughts, emotions and knowledge. It is bound into books and packed into clean sheaves. Stacks of paper clutters desks, fill spiral journals crammed into backpacks. Wads of tissue-thin paper napkins wait at the bottom of fast food bags to wipe away crumbs and be thrown away. Beautiful paper, special paper, waits in files and drawers for the right project.

With the right marks adorning its face, paper can become precious. Duplicated enough, it becomes essentially, and importantly, disposable.

Beyond its use as a surface, it can be folded, molded, out of its flatness into an object, a something in its own right, and not just a vehicle. Great satisfaction is found in pressing paper’s folded edge into a crease. There is beauty in the sound of it slicing.

Paper exists in extremes, as the most disposable of trash to something exquisite, preserved, and sacred. We enrich and destroy paper, and it allows us to shape it into many things.

PAPERWORKS is an exhibit of works on paper, of paper, and about paper in all of its uses.

Feel free to email us here if you have any questions about submitting work to this exhibit.