“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.”
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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.
