Opening reception: Thursday, September 29th 5-7 PM

Did you play with paper dolls as a kid? or design your own paper airplanes? Out of that same spirit of play and love for the special qualities of paper, the Richard L. Nelson Gallery presents Paper Pushers, its major show for the Fall season, curated by Renny Pritikin, the Nelson Director. Running from September 29th through December 11th, the exhibition of sculpture will be accompanied by a full color illustrated catalogue.

Pritikin states, “This exhibition of nine artists includes work that participates in a range of ways to torment paper that includes cutting, hanging, piercing, laying on the floor, molding, wrapping, making dioramas, and building ephemeral objects.”

Artists included in the international lineup include, from Japan, Yuken Teruya, and Midori Harima, from England, David Miles, from Massachusetts, Tom Friedman, and from Northern California, Jason Jagel, Stephanie Syjuco, Nicole Fein, Jill Sylvia, and Christopher Taggart.

Teruya uses designer shopping bags as the sets for his dioramas. Harima makes little girls, fawns and wolves out of Xeroxed images. Miles makes narrative series of mobile images. Friedman presents a large two dimensional paper representation of a three dimensional event. Jagel makes diorama-like drawings and collages. Syjuco will be showing paper jewelry and stereo systems. Fein makes paper objects—a pillow and a cloth—out of woven paper strips. Sylvia makes delicate latticeworks from her Dad’s discarded accounting notebooks. Taggart photographs small objects—his hand, a pig’s heart—and reconstitutes them in enormous proportion.

Curator Pritikin concludes, “Tiny scraps of paper fly through our lives and connect us to each other: receipts and snapshots, scratch paper and baseball tickets, sidewalk litter and newspaper clippings. Paper Pushers pays attention to the overlooked possibilities in the material of our world, and reinvests these ephemeral bits and pieces with a semblance of deferred respect.”

Exhibition runs through December 11th, 2005