The elevator doors opened to the fifth floor of the museum and the wall directly in front of me caught my eye. The clean, minimalistic paper design covered the wall in almost paint-splattered shapes. The crisp edges and hard, although flexible, characteristic of the smooth, thick paper complimented the artist’s choice of using only black. I looked closer and the way the paper was cut, all curvy edges, gave an organic feel and sometimes repeated curved patterns clustered together, reminded me of bird feathers. Crows came to mind, giving me somewhat of a gothic, cool feeling. I started to wonder if the artist was representing death in a minimalistic, contemporary design. I couldn’t help but see the design representing a cluster of splattered crows. If this was done in a different material the repeated curved edges may not have reminded me of feathers and the crispness of the paper might not have seemed so cold. I may not have seen it the same way.
Slash: Paper Under the Knife is a show of works done in paper and is being exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design. I enjoyed most of the work displayed there in awe. Most of it was just really beautiful and/or interesting. It was inspirational as I wondered what I could do with paper and informally brainstormed ways to adapt what I saw into lesson plans for children. I thought about how the artists made each piece and how some of them must have used drawing and cutting with an X-acto knife, such as a ceiling to floor piece of black paper which seemed to have been drawn on and then cut out to form silhouettes of the details of a working city, including people, trees, etc. Some of the work seemed much more complicated to recreate, such as the piece by Olafur Eliasson, in which he used a laser to cut pages of a book to resemble the outline of a house.
Overall, I think that the show pushes the boundaries of the never ending question of "what is art", but at the same time, it holds onto traditional ideas of expression and beauty.
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