paperwork gallery

Jackie Milad: Pics from the Opening

2008-05-16T08:20:00.001-07:00

Essay by Jack Livingston, 2008

2008-05-11T16:16:00.000-07:00

Bird Full of Mud
On the work of Jackie Milad

“Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.
And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.” - Anne Sexton

An avid and lucid daydreamer Jackie Milad’s elegant line drawings document her ruminations. Thematically her work continually circles the twin afflictions of life—sex and death. First traced out in the artist's restrained poetic quasi-Egyptian glyph style, her imagery often later blooms into real life psychological investigations and actions. And while her concerns are decidedly adult they feel intentionally filtered through the sensibilities of a precocious pansexual juvenile. The results are depictions of the awkward moment of the REAL. This makes her work simultaneously charming and unsettling.

These are not images of libertines wallowing in hipster transgression. Milad casts her theater from the masses, exotic everyday commoners who come of age playing games like spin the bottle at dim lit parties, then fumble around paired in dark closets where they emerge transformed flush with dreamy innocent desire. Her work takes us back to our generic archaic selves—each awkwardly learning to fly, bodies of clay winging beneath libidinous rushes of warm air. Plain skin, plain tongue, plain fingers probing plain orifices, all collapsing...wriggling and impish, they pass out in faux catatonic states (on request of the artist—you can participate too) overwhelmed by the contradictions of being (becoming?) ancient hairless possum kin ripe with giggles and flatulence—their genitals cooled out, many behind tight clean stylish undergarments. Something here is reminiscent of the angular gender bending beauty and tone of mid-period magpie culture-artist musician David Bowie.

In one of many subtle role reversals employed by Milad, peacocking males—some reminiscent of the protagonists that populate William Burrough's satiric proto-punk homoerotic novel Wild Boys—are portrayed mouths agape caught in mid-whistle. A thread of masculine exhibitionism and desire runs throughout. The artist, recast as admiring anthropologist with a winking gaze, codifies and indexes this ancient form of communication. She is beguiled both by the ubiquitous nature of the form and its numerous and variant practitioners. Milad maintains a collection of field recordings she captured in Mexico when researching the topic and plans to expand the practice in the future. Also, her Honduran born brothers were all active whistlers. Their expressive tonal displays remain a fond memory from her childhood.

Ultimately all art is autobiographical, and Milad's oeuvre is no exception. But Milad avoids any hint of narcissistic cliché. In her work the self and the other converge in a hot house-of-mirrors—blending into a stew of humanity free-falling perfectly disheveled, goofy and calmly torrid amid empty white space cleaved with muted pendulous washes and echoing across mythic borders all day and through the night—a trickster in a house of love.

Jack Livingston
May 2, 2008

Just Between Us Catalogues Available at Blurb dot Com

2008-05-09T17:12:00.001-07:00

Just Between U...

An Exhibition prese...

By Cara Ober & Dana ...

Book Preview

Paper Airplane

2008-05-09T15:33:00.000-07:00

Sidney Pink

Thanks to everyone who applied! We had an overwhelming response for our first ever juried show! We had over ninety applicants and, in the end, our jurors Amy Raehse and Jackie Milad narrowed it down to just fourteen artists. Congratulations!

Artists: Linda Bills, Sasha Blanton, Jennifer Brickey, Stephanie Beck, Ian Maclean Davis, Sophia Flood, Karl Hluska, Magnolia Laurie, Karena Ness, Nikki Painter, Frank Phillips, Sydney Pink, Rachel Sitkin, Bonner Sale.

Paper Airplane will be up from June 28 - August 30, 2008.

Jackie Milad: Just Between Us opens Thursday, May 15

2008-05-04T11:53:00.000-07:00

J

Just Between Us is a solo exhibit of drawings by local artist and curator Jackie Milad.
Exhibition: May 15 - June 21, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 15 from 7-9 p.m.
The exhibit will include catalogues for sale and a catalogue essay by Jack Livingston.

“Ms. Milad's exuberant andro-fem figures mix archetypes, channeling the likes of Nefertiti, Carolee Schneemann and Courtney Love into one timeless sweetly odd and transgressive "her". They possess a fairy-tale power similar to the late works of the poet Ann Sexton.”-Excerpt from review in Peek Review, by Jack Livingston.

BIOGRAPHY
Jackie Milad is an artist who works with drawing, performance art and installation, and often creates projects that brings these disciplines together. Her projects explore the awkward moments shared between people.

She has exhibited internationally and nationally in such places such as The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Gallery 32 as part of the London Biennale, Delaware Center of Contemporary Art in Wilmington, Museum of Fine Arts in Mazatlan, Mexico and Galeria del Jovenes in Culiacan, Mexico.

In 2005 she earned her MFA from Towson University, and in 2000 she received her BFA from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts. In 1998, Ms. Milad studied painting at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence Italy. She is currently Program Coordinator for the Union Gallery at University of Maryland, College Park. In the winter of 2007-08, Ms. Milad traveled to West Mexico to begin her research and field recordings of local whistling habits.

Call for Entries: "Bright-Shiny New" - A Show of Recent BFA & MFA Graduates

2008-05-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

Call for Entries: "Bright-Shiny New" a juried exhibition at Paperwork Gallery scheduled for September, 2008.

Who can apply: Any 2008 Graduate with a BFA or MFA degree from a Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, DC College. Any undergraduate or graduate degree earner from 2008, with a major or focus on Studio Art, is eligible. However, only works with or on paper will be considered.

Application: Please include a one page resume, an artist statement, a CD with 10 jpeg images of works with or on paper, and a $10.00 application fee. Checks should be made out to Paperwork Gallery.

Due Date: August 1, 2008. However, we will accept submissions on a rolling basis, so earlier submissions are better than later. We will also want time to schedule a studio visit, and to choose specific works for the exhibition.

Where: Please mail applications to Paperwork Gallery. 107 E. Preston Street. Baltimore, MD 21202.

A purchase award of several hundred dollars (still to be determined) and a catalogue will be included with this exhibition.

Size Matters: Bill Schmidt's Most Recent Paintings Explore Emerging Trend of Intimate Abstraction

2008-04-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

4/30/2008 Baltimore Citypaper
ART | Visual Arts

MATCH GAME: Bill Schmidt's "One Of These Things Is Not Like The Other."

Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time
At Paperwork Gallery through May 2
By Bret McCabe

HANGING ANYTHING ON THE WALL often transforms it into the purely decorative. Old street signs, antique stovetop burners, castoff manhole covers, a well-weathered garden trowel, old magazines and record covers--one person's castoff/thrift-store donation is another person's shabby chic to install above that precious sofa found at that very cute little secondhand store around the corner from the coffee shop and sex-positive marital aids shop. Such is the process of object commodification: turning meaningful things into inert objects.

Just don't tell that to Bill Schmidt. The director of the post-baccalaureate program at the Maryland Institute College of Art has the audacity to allow his hanging sculptures to vibrate with possibilities, waiting to become whatever they may be. Lining the back wall of the Paperwork Gallery--the newish space opened last December by local artists Dana Reifler and Cara Ober on the first floor of East Preston Street's Midtown Yoga Center--hang a small array of Schmidt's sculptures-qua-contraptions. These five pieces--combinations of wood, found objects, paint, and exquisite technique--are all tall and thin, starting at about eye level and extending toward the floor. Bluntly named--the tusklike "Not for Nothing," the totemic "Zig-Zag Wanderer," the cagelike "Pendule"--and yet quite sensually constructed, the pieces read like curious contradictions. Think some combination of extravagant Shaker furniture and highly specialized primitive tool. They start to feel like something you might find hanging on the wall of a veteran Nova Scotia seaman, a beautiful instrument intended for pragmatically deadly survival, or something busted out after a catch in which to smoke celebratory tobacco.

These are the sorts of works for which Schmidt is best known. The majority of the works on view in Outside of Time, though, are intimate abstract paintings completed over the past few years, following a residency in Rochefort-en-Terre in the Brittany region of France that, reportedly, rekindled his interest in painting. The nine paintings exhibited are all tight compositions, approximately the size of a printed page, and are rendered in gouache and colored pencil on paper. The colors lean toward the warmer hues (yellows, reds, and their orange progeny), and even when Schmidt turns to the blues, greens, and their aqua splashes, it's more the airy effect of the sky rather than the enigmatic depth of the opaque sea.

Schmidt's abstract vocabulary here is what's disarming. Wily, witty, squishy, biomorphic, so precise in its ordered disarray, it feels a little too endearingly nostalgic, like the not so distant past's imagination of the far-off future. Think 1940s and '50s advertising, graphic design, and marquee lights: rods that end in bulbous globes, sharp angles that jut into elegantly smooth curves, regular polygons whose curves are bent into stiff acute angles and become silhouettes of Flash Gordon comic-strip spaceships, soft bubblelike circles forming chains like a cocktail glass' trail across Formica. Throughout, Schmidt's hand is assuredly expert, and his life experience--titles that allude to player-piano composer Conlon Nancarrow or display his subtle wit, such as "Piecemeal Coexistence"--is integrated into the works with austere modesty.

All of the elements are at play in Schmidt's sculptures, just in different degrees. As evidenced in his five sculptures and an assortment of found-object assemblages also on view, Schmidt's otherworldly ideas aren't sci-fi or some not-yet-possible; they seek the still-possible from the possibly forgotten. Subtle implication is more powerful a push than realized imagination in his works.

For his 1988 film Dead Ringers David Cronenberg conceived surgical instruments for "operating on mutant women," a series of formidably indelicate metal instruments whose mere suggestions of potential bodily use is more threatening than anything that the director could depict on screen. Schmidt's sculptures are similar sorts of mental potential-energy time bombs, as his found-object assemblages read like excavations from an archeological site that hint some early society required tools for crushing, cutting, and possibly even prostate stimulation.

The new paintings, though, aren't as richly kinetically charged. Their overall vibe is whimsical and effervescent, both perfectly fine attitudes for such keenly nostalgic work. Let's just not turn molehills into mountains--viz., an April 19 Roberta Smith article in The New York Times, which observed that small abstraction is "in"--as evidenced by a recent quartet of small abstraction solo shows and bulwarked by the idea of getting small being, perhaps, a form of ideological dissent against the grandiose spectacle of the large panel. Paul Klee is the name dusted off anytime "small" and "abstraction" enters the same discussion, a comparison born more of size than of content, too often ignoring the rapier sociopolitical observations Klee invested in his intimate and deceptively inviting paintings. (The ephemerally organic vocabulary of Toni LaSelle would be a better reference point for Schmidt's paintings here.) Size does matter, natch, but it doesn't define the work; paintings aren't wall-mounted tchotchkes. They do, however, look great hung on the wall.

- Bret McCabe

Date Change - Jackie Milad - Just Between Us Opens Thursday May 15

2008-04-27T10:23:00.001-07:00

"Just Between Us: Drawings by Jackie Milad" Opens Thursday, May 15

2008-04-13T12:18:00.000-07:00

Just Between Us is a solo exhibit of drawings by local artist and curator Jackie Milad.
Exhibition: May 15 - June 15, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, May 15 from 7-9 p.m.
The exhibit will include catalogues for sale and a catalogue essay by Jack Livingston.

“Ms. Milad's exuberant andro-fem figures mix archetypes, channeling the likes of Nefertiti, Carolee Schneemann and Courtney Love into one timeless sweetly odd and transgressive "her". They possess a fairy-tale power similar to the late works of the poet Ann Sexton.”-Excerpt from review in Peek Review, by Jack Livingston.

BIOGRAPHY
Jackie Milad is an artist who works with drawing, performance art and installation, and often creates projects that brings these disciplines together. Her projects explore the awkward moments shared between people.

She has exhibited internationally and nationally in such places such as The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Gallery 32 as part of the London Biennale, Delaware Center of Contemporary Art in Wilmington, Museum of Fine Arts in Mazatlan, Mexico and Galeria del Jovenes in Culiacan, Mexico.

In 2005 she earned her MFA from Towson University, and in 2000 she received her BFA from Tufts University and the School of Museum of Fine Arts. In 1998, Ms. Milad studied painting at the Studio Arts Center International in Florence Italy. She is currently Program Coordinator for the Union Gallery at University of Maryland, College Park. In the winter of 2007-08, Ms. Milad traveled to West Mexico to begin her research and field recordings of local whistling habits.

Urbanite Bi-Weekly Featured Artist

2008-04-09T15:43:00.000-07:00

Bill Schmidt

After a residency in France rekindled his passion for the medium, sculptor and director of MICA's post-baccalaureate program Bill Schmidt has returned to painting. Outside of Time, his latest exhibition, showcases his found-object sculptures and a series of goauche-and-colored-pencil paintings. The exhibit runs through May 2 at Paperwork Gallery. 107 E. Preston St. Free.
www.paperworkgallery.blogspot.com

Updates on Paper Airplane Juried Show

2008-04-02T06:07:00.001-07:00

Thanks to everyone who applied.
We will be meeting with the jurors to make decisions in the next few weeks. You will be notified by email, at latest, at the end of the month, so please be patient with us. Once notified, those accepted will need to bring or send selected pieces to the gallery by June 15, ready to hang. The reception for Paper Airplane will be June 28 and the exhibit will stay up through August 31.

Review from Mark Barry published on ionarts.blogspot.com

2008-03-28T12:23:00.000-07:00

Bill Schmidt @ Paperwork by Mark Barry | Tuesday, March 25, 2008

An artist I've admired since moving to Baltimore, quite a while ago, is Bill Schmidt. Bill, a multi-talented musician (playing the banjo, guitar, ukulele and fiddle) and a long-time teacher at the Maryland Institute and sculptor, has returned to painting, after a residency in Roche-en-Terre, France. The paintings in the exhibit at the Paperwork Gallery, Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time, are all gouache and colored pencil on paper along with several sculptural works.

A bit of an homage to Paul Klee's organic shapes and color, Schmidt's small (7"x5" and under) works are infused with organic forms, but also radiating electronic-like signals and, for me, what feels like an internal world of the human body, with its complex vascular system, molecular structures, and pulsating organs, held in their virtual world by a base of colorful grids. This patient is doing quite well.

The sculptures, for which Bill is most known, are either gently altered found objects, arranged on a shelf (pictured), or larger forms such as Pendule, made of stained wood and found objects, gracefully hanging from its perch. The shadow it casts creates a depth as seen in and around the shapes in the paintings.

to see more images, go to http://ionarts.blogspot.com

Bill Schmidt Opening Pics from March 22

2008-03-28T07:42:00.000-07:00

Pics from Bill Schmidt: Out of Time on the Ten Tigers Blog

2008-03-23T16:12:00.000-07:00

http://thereweretentigers.blogspot.com/2008/03/bill-schmidt-paperwork-gallery.html

Paperwork receives a 2008 Creative Baltimore Grant!

2008-03-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks Baltimore City and Mayor Dixon!

We received a 2008 Creative Baltimore Fund Project Grants for the Artist Groups category. We can now proudly and honestly say, "This (project, program, performance) has been partially funded by the Maryland State Arts Council, Mayor Sheila Dixon and the Baltimore Office of Promotion and The Arts."

yay!

Catalogues available at Blurb dot Com

2008-03-15T13:24:00.000-07:00

Bill Schmidt: ...

An exhibition of Pa...

By Dana Reifler & Dr...

Bill Schmidt: Outside of Time opens Saturday, March 22

2008-03-15T07:43:00.001-07:00

Bill Schmidt Bio
Bill Schmidt was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1947. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine before moving to Baltimore in 1969. He received an MFA from the Hoffberger School of Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art in 1971. He has exhibited his painting, drawing, and sculpture extensively in the Mid-Atlantic region. He has received numerous grants and awards including two Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Awards, one in Sculpture (1990) and one in Painting (2008). In June of 2004 he attended the Alfred and Trafford Klots Residency Program in Rochefort-en-Terre, France.

After teaching for a decade following graduate school, he began working in the field of restoration, first on gilded objects and then on furniture finishes. In 2001 he became the Interim Director of the Post-Baccalaureate Program at the Maryland Institute College of Art after being its Resident Artist since 1996. In 2007 he was appointed Director, a position he continues to hold.

In addition to his life as an artist, he is a musician who has played traditional American music on fiddle, banjo, and guitar for over 30 years. He is a member of the Double Decker String Band and the Hoover Uprights. To hear selections by both bands go to www.5-string.com

For more images and information, go to www.billschmidt.org.

"The Art of Bill Schmidt, A Singular Movement" Essay by Dr. Michael Salcman

2008-03-15T07:41:00.001-07:00

In his Creative Credo (1920), Paul Klee asks “Does a pictorial work come into being at one stroke?” and answers “No, it is constructed bit by bit, just like a house”. The art of Bill Schmidt, a man who reveres Paul Klee and knows something about constructing objects with wood, rewards what some of us call slow looking. If you look closely at the paintings and sculptures of Bill Schmidt an unruly flock of associations rises up in the mind, names like Steven Wheeler of the American Indian Movement, or Forrest Bess, that cranky early Modernist from Texas, or Louise Bourgeois, the surrealist-feminist après la lettre, or William Baziotes, that gentle and somewhat peripheral member of the New York School, or even Paul Klee himself, a magician who stood apart from all organized movements. As taught to us by Alfred Barr and Clement Greenberg, the history of Modernism is not only a succession of styles and movements but a succession of groups, artists linked together by common interests, themes and working methods, like impressionists or cubists, abstract expressionists and minimalists. Whether the artists within any particular historical group were friends or bitter rivals, whether they showed together often or not at all, matters to the historian not a whit. Soon enough they are pigeonholed and slotted into a category, a decision based on visual evidence or the conceptual basis of their work, assigned to a style or school in the march of decades across a text. But this is not all there is to the history of art in the last century or so and this method cannot work for those singular artists who constitute a movement of one.

Singular artists, almost by definition, work against the prevailing mood of the artistic moment; frequently they revisit a supposedly outmoded visual style or employ a method or technology no longer deemed viable. The recent gouaches of Bill Schmidt and his earlier sculptures contain a strong biomorphic impulse, a type of imagery and buried content so strongly connected with European surrealism that it has spent the past few decades out in the wilderness, banished from contemporary art by abstract expressionists, Pop-ists and hard-core minimalists alike. Surrealism was the 1940s movement that Pollock came from, not the destination towards which he was headed, it was the style associated with well-behaved European abstractionists like Arp and Tanguy, a pictorial tic at odds with the American emphasis on self-expression, angst and size or its supposed opposite, emotional reserve and factory finish. Biomorphism was too dream-oriented, too Freudian, too polite. In the 1950s, those artists still drawn to biomorphic shapes saw their reputations permanently damaged or their public reception delayed for years. Take for example Gabor Peterdi’s obsessive etchings and engravings (he’s only a technician, a teacher!), the subaqueous paintings of Baziotes (Uptown minor expressionist!), the sculptures and drawings of Louise Bourgeois (she’s really French!), or the strange little boxes Cornell was fabricating in a domestic environment on Utopia Parkway in Queens (who knew?). This prejudice against the biomorphic has loosened up somewhat in our polymorphous new century, though even Terry Winters has moved away from his natural inclination. The much more important art of Elizabeth Murray, an artist who chose to use the organic despite having been educated in the heyday of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, is still marginalized by the critical mainstream.

Born in Trenton in 1947, Schmidt was educated at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Maryland Institute College of Art where he has taught for many years. There is a modesty and uprightness to his physical being and emotional aspect that has almost vanished from the American scene, let alone in the cavernous spaces of Chelsea. Like a frontiersman, Schmidt does many things well; he has a self-sufficiency that is striking. In addition to being an expert refinisher of furniture and a gilder, he is a fine musician who plays traditional American music on banjo, fiddle, ukulele and guitar. After more than two decades as a maker of objects others would call “sculpture”, a residency in Rochefort-en-Terre, France, returned him to his roots as a painter. All of the paintings in this show were made with gouache (opaque watercolor) and executed in the last two years. Many of them have additional markings of colored pencil and water-soluble crayon. That they are intimate in scale is of greatest importance; the largest painting is only 7 x 5 inches while the smallest is two and a half inches square. And though Schmidt is a student of Persian miniatures and manuscript illumination, his abstractions clearly channel the work of Paul Klee, the one great Modernist who almost always worked in small scale. Schmidt develops a repertoire of shapes and figures, transferring them with tracing paper into other formats, situating them in a universe of shifting planes and uncertain space. “Lineup” seems the closest to Klee in shape and format, assembling three “personnages” across a plaid landscape of roses and yellows. Like miniature upright sculptures, each shape has a unique identity and is read as human by the anthrocentric eye of the viewer. Though the space behind them is ambiguous, the crossing lines forming and re-forming myriads of cells, the three shapes are free to interact even if they never will. Something similar happens in “Small Plaid Universe”, the very title of which discloses the somewhat larger ambitions Schmidt has for the import of his work. Here the shapes almost look like Indian arrowheads (cf. Steven Wheeler) arrayed on a blanket, little jagged lines of cosmic energy disrupting the well-behaved cells, some of which have affinities with the Constellations of Joseph Albers. The action takes place on a small green stage or Klee-like pedestal drawn at the bottom of the composition.

In “Hokum”, Schmidt’s little universe gets a bit unruly, yellow, green and pink diagonals and jagged lines of blue replacing the minimalist regularity, little bits of cosmic “strings” arrayed in hoops entwining the single biomorphic shape. A general increase in the number of components leads to further spatial complexity; this is also seen in “Ends Against the Middle”, a work in which the top and bottom shapes collapse against the middle. Schmidt’s doodling reaches a manic intensity in “On A Tiny Planet”, a painting almost subaqueous in its greenish skein of nets and barbed wire fences (cf. Baziotes), portraying an environment in which a tan personnage with orange highlights battles a multi-armed yellow and red creature, the whole of which looks nothing so much like a computer circuit board, and the teasingly-named “One of These Things Is Not Like The Other”, a painting in which Schmidt’s entire cast of characters seem to take a bow. The music of the avant-garde composer Conlon Nancarrow inspires a similarly complex landscape of microscopic creatures afloat in a cubist petri dish. The beautiful outlier in the show, the little painting called “It Ain’t a Sin to Shed Your Skin”, is an almost perfect tribute to the art of Elizabeth Murray. The single figure of red and yellow recalls the layering of her fractured planes, the background stripes the influence of Frank Stella on her art, the pincers on each side (and the title) the difficulty of moving on from one phase of life to another. That the impulse for such intellectual and technical play reaches back to Paul Klee, not to mention the light washes of color hidden in the interstices of each piece, is not surprising.

Though abstract and of modest scale, the wall-hung sculptures of Bill Schmidt occupy an almost opposite visual extreme to that of his paintings; monochromatic and hieratic, they are more formal, though not without their humorous moments. The two bodies of work almost look like a group show of at least two artists or a family gathering of distant cousins. Nevertheless, the sculptures share with the drawings an interest in biomorphic shape and the interiority of space; many of the sculptures are cages surrounding voids like African masks, not unlike the interstices of the drawings. In his sculptural objects, Schmidt is naturally less interested in the issue of interior light than how the forms penetrate the real space around them. Insistently vertical, Schmidt’s structures share a family resemblance with the personnages of Louise Bourgeois. Despite their deceptive simplicity, his sculptures may offer a more reliable self-portrait of the artist in abstentia than does more conventional work incorporating an artist’s actual presence. A woodworker and enthusiastic camper, and an outwardly reserved, compulsive perfectionist, Schmidt shares the sly humor and decidedly vertical extension of his sculptures. But Schmidt’s voice may not be the only one speaking in these works, conflicted as they are between the useful and the useless; in them, we hear an entire chorus of discarded Americana and nostalgia for the verities of Art Deco. That they are light to the hand and made of wood is not incidental; Schmidt’s sculptures share the quiet assurance of organic growth one sees in all his work. Between the drawings and the sculptures we are immersed in a forest of signs for our social and solitary selves, upright creatures moving through the world, sensible to the microscopic world that moves within us. An artist of his time who has assumed a stance outside of time, Schmidt’s contemplative art reveals the interpenetration of experience from the atomic through the personal to the cosmic like that of almost no one else I know.

- Dr. Michael Salcman

Audio and Video Interview with Elena Volkova from Radar Redux

2008-02-24T18:25:00.000-08:00

http://www.radarredux.net/reviews/volkova_rev.html

Footage from Waterlines opening reception and Elena talking eloquently about her work. Thanks to Jack Livingston and Radar Redux for time, energy, and (thankfully) editing!

For more audio and video interviews, go to www.radarredux.net

Have You Heard? Urbanite Magazine Feb '08

2008-02-24T18:23:00.001-08:00

Modest Masterpiece

For some, the idea of owning original art is as abstract as a Jackson Pollock: Sure, it’s big and beautiful, but who can afford it? Paperwork Gallery, located in the Midtown Yoga building in Mount Vernon (107 E. Preston St.), aims to remedy that with its exhibits of high-quality, affordable works on paper. Opened in December by visual artists Cara Ober and Dana Reifler, Paperwork features art made by both emerging and established Baltimore artists. (Disclosure: Ober is an occasional Urbanite contributor; Reifler is a participant in the 2008 Urbanite Project.) Exhibit catalogs are available for all shows, and additional works from represented artists are available. Catalogs can be purchased at or at the gallery.

The opening for Paperwork’s new show featuring Elena Volkova’s photography is Feb. 8, 7 p.m.–9 p.m. Open Fri 4 p.m.–7 p.m. and by appointment. Go to paperworkgallery.blogspot.com.

—Marianne Amoss

Paper Airplane: Call for Entries due April 1

2008-02-19T18:53:00.003-08:00

Paperwork Gallery in Baltimore, MD presents a national juried show of works on paper, including drawings, paintings, prints, mixed media, and photography. Jurors: Amy Eva Raehse, Director of Goya Contemporary Gallery and Jaqueline Milad, Director of the Union Gallery at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Exhibition dates: June 15 - August 30. Applications must be postmarked by April 1. Applications should Include three jpegs, a title sheet, a one page resume, and a $15 application fee made out to Paperwork Gallery. Send applications to: Paperwork Gallery. 107 E. Preston Street. Baltimore, MD. 21202. Please email us at paperworkgallery@gmail.com for more questions.

Waterlines Essay by John Penny

2008-02-14T06:15:00.000-08:00

Viewing the recent work of Elena Volkova immediately involves the viewer with questions about their awareness of boundaries and location. To paraphrase Edmund Jabes observation that “Light needs much dark in order to dazzle” , these works need much space in order to be situated.

By paying close attention to some of the images one can deduce that they are windows framing the sky, whilst other images may be of snow banks, or the sea, perhaps with mist, or the imprecision of a photographic time exposure. However, what they are – whether graphite drawings or photographs, or even what they are images of – is of secondary importance to how they are. They are tenuous.

As clouds, mist, snow, or blurred moving water the surfaces under consideration are barely ‘captured’, or at best, slight notated as fleeting states of affairs. They are citations of tenuity, lacking as they do, substance, or solidarity. Their thinness and scant perceptibility is most obvious in the relationship that is maintained with their boundaries. Edges are only established in order to bring themselves into question.

If the images are tenuous, then so is their form of presentation. Where the images are located on the paper is approximate. The photographs ‘anchor’ the centre of the page but are indeterminate in terms of where they stop or start vertically, and the drawings are anchored by an almost indiscernible grid to the paper that supports them and that either they fade into or emerge from. The work is suspended by clips from stretched wires, and is viewed against walls comprised of different surfaces. The paper curves slightly and casts shadows; it carries its images but is still allowed materiality in our space, even if it is a vulnerable materiality. The size of the sheet of paper, whether large or small, never lets the viewer forget that it is a material; a material bearing an image and suspended in front of a wall as an insubstantial intervention in our space. The openness of the material to the viewer, it’s vulnerability, has a direct bearing on one’s perception of the work and it’s meaning.

Temporality and contingency come together in the moment of the artwork, in one’s encounter with the artwork, to reinforce the tenuousness of that encounter. An encounter in which one is pointedly reminded of our own tentative presence and attempts at making sense of what is before us physically and by implication.

- John Penny

A few photos from Elena's Opening Reception...

2008-02-14T06:11:00.000-08:00

There will be more pics soon! Elena has a fancy camera and we didn't realize it was set on manual focus. Oops.

Waterlines: Photographs and Drawings by Elena Volkova - Opens February 8, 7-9 p.m.

2008-01-19T07:22:00.000-08:00

from the Airscapes Installation

Waterlines Opening Reception: Friday, February 8, from 7-9 p.m.
Exhibition: February 8 - March 15, 2008
Paperwork Gallery is located at 107 E. Preston Street / Baltimore, MD

Artist Statement:
When you gaze into the sky, are you aware that you are gazing into emptiness? Do you see the sky as a barrier between you and infinity? If you perceive something as being empty, is it because you understand the concept of fullness, or is it because of fullness you perceive emptiness?

My artistic curiosity lie in the interchange between nothing and something, and its manifestation in everyday reality. While focused on natural elements, I am interested in the threshold between the two, their connotative values, and the ways in which they inform and question each other.

For the premise of my work, I focus on forms easily recognizable and universally understood: water, sky, land, forms that are part of our everyday poetry, sublime or mundane. Creating photographs of these subjects, my goal is to explore how much visual information is needed to perceive the essence of the subject against the background of nothing, a void. I am interested in the ways in which this essence serves as a framework for nothingness, as well as the ways it manifests itself against the canvas of nothing.

My exploration of nothingness is informed by Eastern philosophy, in which the notion of nothing is understood as the beginning and the potential. This I believe varies significantly from the Western existential notion of nothing as doom or death. According to the Taoist principles of Chinese painting, space is not a measurable quantity, but rather a means for suggesting the immeasurable vastness. Similarly, in most of my photographic work, the subject matter is gradually obliterated into large areas of a white void, suggesting unknown vastness and unrealized possibilities. Presenting the viewer with subtle indications of an image on a mostly white piece of photo paper, my goal is to bring forth the dialogue between the infinite qualities of the landscape and the limitations of the photographic process. In addition, I wish to question the viewer's perception of the boundaries - the edges of the piece of paper and the edges of the image - determined by camera framing.

Artist Bio:
Elena Volkova was born and raised in Kiev, Ukraine, and moved to the US in 1994. In 2007 she earned an MFA in Studio Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art where she studied under the mentorship of John E. Penny, PhD, and a BFA in Photography, minor in Art History from MICA. Elena has exhibited work in Baltimore, Washington DC, New York, Philadelphia, Illinois, and Virginia. She received several recognitions and awards, including the Janis Meyer Traveling Fellowship which allowed her to photograph the outskirts of Russia in 2003. Volkova resides in Baltimore, MD.

Waterlines Catalogues are Available...

2008-01-19T07:18:00.000-08:00

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Waterlines: El...

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