Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Paper Cuts; Two Artists and Why They Work With Paper

“Cutting paper is like drawing with the mind of a sculptor,” says Beatrice Coron, one of the artists featured this summer at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museums exhibition, Fold, Paper, Scissors. Coron’s work is personal and subjective; as a worker of many odd jobs before becoming a professional artist, she translates her experiences into intricate pieces. Her works feature social situations and fragments of her realistic imagination. For Tahiti Pehrson, coming to paper cutting was a more evolved process. Starting with bootleg stencil t-shirts in high school, then moving to San Francisco and being influenced by street art, Pehrson saw a stencil could stand on its own as a piece, and from there his current work began.  His pieces are more abstract, stating the reason he is drawn to such nonfigurative inspirations is because he is influenced from architecture, mathematics, history, nature, and other topics which are out of human control.


Pehrson works mostly with 3-D, while Coron dabbles in it, although Pehrson sticks to paper and Coron experiments with other materials. “I want to evolve personally, and we live in a three dimensional world. For most of my life I was a painter and I didn’t like the 2-D limitation,” says Pehrson, “It’s the thing that almost every painter has fought against. You are in this constant quest to create the illusion of depth and the illusion of light and shadow.” Coron’s 3D work is often commissioned by cities for public areas. She has put many installations in the Bronx, NYC, and her native France. “I begin public art commissions by researching the space and its usage. From there I look for a concept,” says Coron. “Once I have the concept I look for images and materials. I always have to work within a time frame, a budget, [have] to consider functionality and easy maintenance. It is like a puzzle with multi-level problems to solve and finding a solution that makes sense.”


Coron and Pehrson both embody excellence in their craft. For Coron, paper cutting is her way of combining storytelling, sculpture and drawing. “I start with a full material where the art is already in it, I then remove the excess material,” she states. Pehrson, however, wants to see how far he can push the boundaries of this type of work in the future. Aiming for more commissioned work, he hopes to work with new materials, different scales and more organic shapes. 

From intricately and precisely cut paper “drawings” to mathematically mind-boggling folds to a single sheet of paper, the artists in this exhibition, including Coron, Pehrson and many more, are pushing the boundaries of this sparse material far beyond the limits of its everyday purpose. The Fold, Paper, Scissors paper cutting and folding exhibition is running from May 2, 2014-August 10, 2014 at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum in the Dobson Main Gallery.