Exhibition

This exhibition consisted only of sculptures assembled by the audience — collaborators — multiple copies of each artist’s idea, each unique in that it was fabricated by an individual visitor.

In blurring the distinction between the audience and the artists, this exhibition posed a number of questions. At what point is a work of art complete? Who is the author of an object imagined by one person and completed by another? What is the relationship between two-dimensional image and three-dimensional object, instruction and inspiration, originality and repetition, mass production and the handmade? And where do we locate failure or success in a project like this?

The open-ended nature of these questions and the answers they provoked resulted in the staggeringly wide range of art projects included in The Paper Sculpture Show. Folded, cut, crumpled, and even burned, paper here proves itself to be a generous material capable of producing sculptures inspired by cultural examples as diverse as paper-doll books, Mad magazine “fold-ins,” and exploded schematic diagrams. Using this humble material, which is ubiquitous to the point of invisibility in everyday life, the artists in The Paper Sculpture Show offered a visually stunning, conceptually rich, and playfully hands-on exploration of artistic practice today.

The Paper Sculpture Show was organized by Cabinet magazine, Independent Curators International (ICI), and SculptureCenter. It was curated by Mary Ceruti, Matt Freedman, and Sina Najafi, and accompanied by The Paper Sculpture Book, which contained the entire exhibition in unassembled, take-home form. The traveling exhibition was organized and circulated by Independent Curators International.

Images