Works By

Michelle Benoit
Suzi Cozzens
Amy Eisenfeld Genser
Lynne Johnson
Gunta Kaza
Michele Levesque

March 6 – April 3, 2003

The exhibition’s goal is to focus attention upon paper’s inherent plasticity and flexibility – From pulp to formed sheet, paper can be molded, torn, cut, folded, printed, pasted and recycled; the possibilities are limitless. And although paper has primarily been used as a means for storing information and used widely in printing writing and drawing, once it is molded and manipulated into 3-dimensional shapes, mathematical solids, constructions, book forms, garments, even flying machines paper becomes transposed. It has undergone an alchemical transmutation into a three dimensional arena where everything becomes possible.

Michelle Benoit begins her pieces by collecting artifacts, objects and ephemera that represent time. And for her, time exists through the present moment, through memory, or derived from the physicality of place. She shapes works that seek to alter chronological sequence of things and to reassess associations with particular objects. Through these investigations, she realigns certain images/ideas in ways that shift perceptions of time as a linear event into a realm of simultaneity in which the past, present, and future exist in the same moment.

Suzi Cozzens is a chef turned graphic designer and uses papermaking as a way to stay in touch with the essence of a direct hands on experience. She describes the papermaking process in terms of those skills that are required as analogous to those essential in preparing and cooking a meal. For her it is a visceral experience and one that invites the audience to explore along with her those nuances that come from creating paper and objects about paper.

Amy Eisenfeld Genser uses paper to explore and address her fascination with texture, color, pattern and form. Her works seek to capture essences of things – the flow of water, the shape of a beehive, the organic irregularity found in rock formations, moss and seaweed, the structure of books, man-made patterns in the landscape and mathematical grids. She creates a dynamic fusion of those elements as they become redefined as expressions of her delight in the revelation of each new transformation.

As a printmaker, Lynne Johnson has worked often with the collagraph process and is drawn to those textures inherent in the plate building process. Collagraph is a process of constructing printing surfaces from collaged materials, which are then inked and printed as an etching. Her work has mined the riches of collagraphs’ ability to use one material to suggest another and through these investigations her work has evolved into large scale environmental pieces that seek to introduce natural surfaces into human-occupied spaces. Her work invites us to pay attention to boundaries between meaning and idea, spaces between public and private while manipulating disparate but related elements of soft and pliant and hard and strong.

Gunta Kaza recycles worn dishcloths, old books, reweaves bits paper into haunting stories that reflect her history as a women, reveal her connections to her past and her identity as an immigrant to the United States. Using papermaking, bookmaking, photography, sculpture, and exhibition, she seeks personal revelations and tries to reveal the hidden meaning and the inner truth in the mundane, the ordinary.

California based artist Michele Levesque works with the cast-offs and leftovers of both her life and the lives of those around her, building works that tell stories, reveal memories and create histories. Autobiographical in nature, these installations allow her the opportunity to look deeper into her daily routines and experiences, reassess conversations with those around her and ultimately document her life by making tangible those memories and histories that shape her life.