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NY Arts Magazine, 2007, review by Pamela A. Popeson
NY Arts Magazine, 2004, review by Pamela A. Popeson
NY Arts Magazine, 2001, review by Carl E. Hazlewood
Artnet.com Magazine Drawing Notebook, 2001, review by N.F. Karlins
Review Magazine, 1999, review by Mark Daniel Cohen
Cover Magazine, 1999, review by Chloe Veltman
Essay by Jonathan Goodman, 1999
Manhattan Times, 2005, review by Mike Fitelson
"Sky Pape Retrospective: Ink, Scissors, Paper, at River Stone Arts," Review by Pamela A. Popeson, NY Arts Magazine, July 2007
A strikingly impressive mid-career retrospective of the artist Sky Pape’s work is currently on view at River Stone Arts, a 10,000 square foot gallery space in Haverstraw, New York, a small, arty blue collar town on the west bank of the Hudson river twenty-five minutes north of New York City.
Pape’s work is widely exhibited and is in several major museum collections including the MoMA and the Guggenheim as well numerous private collections. This exhibit features 59 abstract drawings from six series or bodies of work dating from 1998 to the present. While each of the series communicates its own set of investigations and revelations there is sense of interrelated explorations felt at the heart of the larger body of work.
In physics, work is defined as the product of a force times the distance through which that force acts. The same definition can apply to the arts. With Pape’s work the distance is hopefully not yet fully known but the force running through these six bodies of work is best described (by name in Chinese at least) as Qi, or Chi, he Chinese Taoist concept of a force, a circulating life energy, inherent in all things.
There is no single word in English to describe this force, perhaps because Qi is known, felt and understood viscerally rather then intellectually. And in the way that Qi is much more than its definition Pape’s drawings are much more than a description of the materials or the manner of her manipulations of the materials. The drawings are essentially poetic narratives or intimate abstract portraits of the existent energies, organic and inorganic, found in ourselves or in nature, energies we recognize as life force (AKA Qi.)
Being inherent in all things, Qi is felt by all beings and by definition felt universally and individually at the same time. Similarly we respond to Pape’s drawings with a personal reaction to a universal experience.
In the earliest series in the exhibit “Inklings,” Pape has built simple yet sublime abstract patterns from torn and reassembled handmade paper (expanding it and/or folding it back on itself) combined with or accompanied with her specific ink work. In “Drawing Breath,” her most recent body of work, the artist blows inks onto, over, and across handmade (and in some cases rare) papers and cuts and layers fields, forms and filigreed line drawings of paper. These lithe and lyrical abstract collages seem to have come to us straight from the aesthetic realm of the ether, fluent in all languages and ready to communicate if not an innate comprehensive knowledge of all things then certainly a wonder at life.
The works are placed by series in intimate groupings, yet the openness of the space offers views of each group juxtaposed with an earlier or later group, revealing the shared themes as well as a sense of the artist’s journey. The ink work of the “Inklings” drawings leads to the impossibly bold and free yet poignantly precise brushed ink strokes of the saturated ink drawings of the “Behind the Seen” body of work with a stop along the way for exploring the form and meditative movement achieved though the layered graphite lines in the “Silver Lining” group.
Pape considers herself a drawer and uses the set of traditional drawing materials: pen, inks, in brush, pencil, graphite, and papers. Clearly the work comes out of the drawing tradition, but it goes to a very contemporary place in the most meaningful of ways. Pape says a goal is to “add to the vocabulary” of drawing. However, her intimate relationship with her materials allows her to take her drawings to a point beyond what would seem possible, moving well past adding to the vocabulary and into the position of expanding the fundamental grammar of drawing.
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"Illuminated Brush Strokes," Review by Pamela A. Popeson
NY Arts Magazine, March 2004
You know the feeling you get standing under a star-studded night sky? A sky where you can see nothing but stars from horizon to horizon and easily even pick out the Milky Way? Where all at once you're struck by the overwhelming enormity of life and the unsubstantial fragility of your own puny existence? Where you want to weep at the inconceivable beauty of life? Where you're breathing all but stops because it's breaking your heart, this bittersweet-ness, while pulling it wide open to let in more? Well, that's pretty much the feeling you get standing in a room surrounded by artist Sky Pape's new works on paper currently on exhibit in the June Kelly Gallery.
In the exhibit titled "Behind the Seen: Saturated Ink Drawings" there are ten larger mounted pieces and a number of smaller drawings and you want to take in everything these pictures have to give. It's inspiring and it's illuminating and then somehow everything turns and you're the vulnerable one, you're the naked one. Besides the universal truths there's personal truths being revealed and as it turns out they're not just Pape's they're yours too.
Her past work has often reflected an Eastern sensibility and for these new drawings she use Japanese hake brushes, anywhere from five to seven inches across, to saturate sheets of kozo paper with sumi ink. "By going into the paper, behind and underneath the surface, the drawing gains a unique kind of physicality-seeking out what lies beyond the surface appearances…" says Pape when speaking about the effects of her ink saturation technique. Through a series of sweeping brush strokes that show both meditative restraint and flights of freedom Pape creates abstract patterns that evoke an intensely personal sense of the knowing and understanding of the universal landscape of the spiritual.
When an artist seeks to uncover truths, designedly spiritual or not, there's always the danger of exposing dogmatic doctrine and contrived schemes of religiosity instead. There is no need to worry about that here. Pape reveals a purity of vision through an honest exploration of personal truths. There's no preaching of prepackaged utopian paths, just pure art speaking from soul to soul.
The two largest pieces in the show Thesis and Antithesis, which face each other from a distance across the gallery as if from across time, share a rhythm and balance that builds upon itself drawing us into their centers. They bring to mind the sublime movement of two martial arts masters of the highest order only you are both standing outside as a witness to the sublime and gone inside having become the very essence of it. In "Insight", a construction of several smaller adjoined panels, the patterns created by the brushwork suggests Paleozoic ammonites, evoking all the mysteries of nature inherent in those ancient forms. In another drawing,"Guru", it seems one can hear the visionary voices of some half destroyed stone Buddha from the jungle of Angor Wat whispering secrets through Pape's great lines the way the sun sends light filtering through the leaves of a great tree or the slats of a palace venetian blind.
In what is considered by many a time of spiritual bankruptcy the visionary Pape fills the coffers and throws open the doors to the vaults on pure art that speaks honest truths. And she does it brilliantly. The exhibit "Behind the Seen: Saturated Ink Drawings" runs from December 12 through January 13th 2004. The June Kelly Gallery is located at 591 Broadway and at www.junekellygallery.com.
Review by Carl E. Hazlewood
NY Arts Magazine, November 2001
I go out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
lit only by the far off moon
on the edge of the mountains.
Izumi Shikibu (a Japanese woman of the Heian Court)
In reproduction Sky Pape's work on paper looks like brushed steel--silvery, with barely gestural strokes that track the movements of the hand in almost meditative arcing sweeps around and within the contours of an implied tondo. In actuality the images are revealed to be made of something rather less intractable. Instead of the impermeable resistance of metal, these are actually drawings on board. But they don't yield the lightness of touch one expects from an average sketch, and they are not preparatory--rather, they are conceived as independent projects. Marks are made with a hard graphite pencil that is firmly impressed into the ground. Lines bunch tightly together and totally cover the surface in parallel directional configurations which yield a variety of abstract images. These works result from careful deliberation--in practical terms as well as in a metaphysical sense. Pared-down and refined to a glistening mineral luster, Pape's tondo shapes have learned something from minimalism, while shedding that movement's overbearing machismo for something more inflected, an interiority closer to the reductiveness of poetry. It becomes a visual haiku where one seeks to rescue a fleeting expressive image revealed from within a dimension of pervading darkness. "And from the/ceiling/darkness bends/a heavy flame." ("The Cold Room" by Yvor Winters). Planes curve, shift and change as darkness pushes back the light which falls glimmering off the resistant surfaces. And for a moment the flat graphite circles become holes inviting entrance. But it is only an illusion. Like her large, equally reticent, but quietly expressive work using tightly packed leaves of kozo paper briefly touched at the edges by sumi ink, the new graphite "Silver Lining" drawings refer to Eastern aesthetics for its inspiration. The organic processes of nature and science are also sources of inspiration (think of Leonardo's drawing studies showing the way water moves in a storm). Sky Pape, is a native of Toronto, Canada, who lives and works in New York City.
Artnet.com Magazine Drawing Notebook
Review by N.F. Karlins, October 2001
Also exhilarating is new work by the seasoned, Canadian-born artist Sky Pape. At first glance the pieces in Sky Pape's "Silver Linings: Graphite Drawings" at June Kelly look like burnished aluminum disks in low relief against a flat background. At least the flat background is accurate. Pape uses only graphite in a freehand-drawn circle to conjure up a glowing central disc against pale yellow milk paint on board. Seemingly three-dimensional planes shimmer and dance before the viewer's eyes. The shifting light effects are magical, seeming to emanate from a space deep inside the picture plane. The light then reaches out and vibrates within the beholder. Nature and Eastern esthetics are put to excellent use in these coolly luminous pieces.
Review Magazine (front page article on "Inklings" solo show at June Kelly Gallery)
Excerpted from a review by Mark Daniel Cohen, June 1999
[Her method] turns out to be a remarkably effective technique of abstraction, for conveying the sensation of disembodied tangibles, of physical facts with no configuration drawn from nature…Pape's paper-and-ink technique is thus remarkably capable of conveying a sense of tangible mystery, of a heavy presence of the half of our world that is forever beyond precise conception but is ever close at hand. She sees and reveals the thing that is felt to be just over one's shoulder, that is caught momentarily out of the corner of the eye, that is nearby until one looks straight at it and then isn't there at all…Pape's visual language speaks of such things that are past the grasp of direct statement…Pape's artistic language is the language of nature because it has been developed out of her craft, out of the manipulation of the simple materials of art. That is the reason her idiosyncratic manner is legible to us. It is something more than a private code of meaning; it is why we are fluent in her language…Pape is clearly among those artists who know that a great deal of art has been and continues to be about mystery, that art often makes mystery tangible, that it often reveals mystery, which is not to dispel it but to make it evident, make it immediate, while retaining all that is mysterious about that truth the artist is pursuing. All is revealed even as nothing is deduced, is simplified, is made digestible, is made comfortable, is made the receptacle for mere opinion. It is simpler and more direct to say that art has often been a sibling of mysticism. Religious art, Byzantine art, art of pure abstraction has had much in common with meditative disciplines whose goal is to alter consciousness. And much of art still does, when it is created with the passion that Pape has infused into her works, and through her works, into her viewers.
Cover Magazine "Processing Natural Order: Sky Pape at June Kelly Gallery"
Review by Chloe Veltman, September 1999
Sky Pape's Inklings deal with time, yet possess neither beginning nor end. Pape describes her pieces as "works of inconspicuous beginnings," but the endings, resisting definiton, are equally obscure. Pape's work has its origins in the tradition of paper and ink drawings, but rather than seeing paper as a flat surface upon which to sketch, Pape's hand-torn strips of stiff, pulpy Japanese Kozo paper protrude from the galery walls in horizontal rows, creating fascinating three-dimentional effects.One of the most striking of these is the moment-to-monent play of natural elements of the works. As the breeze blew in June Kelly's Broadway gallery, so the layers of paper subtly rippled; as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the walls, so the changing light transformed the physical surfaces of the pictures.
In Drift (1999), splattered dots of dark ink randomly spot the gleaming white terrain. Dabbing color onto the uppermost strips, the artist allowed the ink to soak through the layers haphazardly.. The finished work is an ingenious relaization of the processes and unpredictability of time.
"Driven by the existence and effects of incomprehensible, randome forces within a rational system of implied order," Pape's words find their apotheosis in The Last Letter, (1998). With its segmented landscape of bleeding, frayed edges, the picture suggests unfinished business.
Not least for the choice of Japanese materials and the simple uncluttered lines, Pape's work reflects a strong Eastern influence. The stiff parchment pleats recall the designs of Issey Miyake, while thematically, the focus on the random processes of nature glances toward Buddhist teaching. Pape's works adorn the walls of galleries, private homes, and corporations, yet unsurprisingly, she would like to see her works displayed in a place for meditation.
Essay on "Inklings" at June Kelly Gallery, by Jonathan Goodman
"Inklings," the title of Sky Pape's exhibition, points out the artist's desire to have her art seen within a tradition: works on paper. And yet, while her current efforts employ standard materials—ink and graphite on paper—they are also exploratory in both category and historical tradition. At once intricate and elegantly simple in their form, her drawings extend the idea of drawing as a medium, finding not only formal but metaphysical complexity in what Pape has described as "works of inconspicuous beginnings."
Despite Pape's offhand, even diffident description of her art's origins, it quickly becomes clear that she is addressing large issues and grand themes. The drawings are arresting as visual statements; they attain a sculptural volume, consisting of scores and scores of strips of Kozo paper (a Japanese paper handmade from one of the strongest of the paper-making fibers), arranged in horizontal rows. Her hand-torn strips are usually treated with ink or graphite, then pasted to one another and extended as much as two inches off the wall. They offer the viewer a series of edges, often darkened, which serve as limits to the paper's close-to-sculptural presence. Metaphorically, the material presence of the paper strips—their unusual ability to indicate physical depth—serves to suggest its opposite: the experience of a spiritual intensity which connotes absence and emptiness more than anything else.
Pape's method alludes to several kinds of perception, both actual and conceptual. The contemplative beauty of the work lies, to some extent, in a period of personal loss during the past few years, including the death of her sister and a disastrous studio fire. According to Pape, these misfortunes freed her to take certain risks with new form, which accounts for the formal idiosyncrasy and adventurousness of these drawings. The artist is attempting to document nature—or, more particularly, what happens in nature—as a process, without being descriptive of its particulars. As she points out, the drawings are "driven by the existence and effects of incomprehensible, random forces within a rational system of implied order."
In the large (106 by 96 inches), powerful piece entitled I'll Go First (1999), Pape has suggested landscape with the most minimal of means. Working with Sumi ink on Kozo paper, she begins with dark edges at the top of the composition, and continues this for the upper two-thirds of the piece. The atmosphere is resonant of a night sky. Then the lower third of I'll Go First grows gradually lighter, with the bottom's edges nearly a pure white; additionally, the drawing is divided into fourths, with the ends of the torn strips creating three equally spaced vertical seams. The incremental nature of this drawing gives us a visual equivalent of its process, in which fine measurements of duration—gradations of time—become physical artifacts. Mystery, an important aspect of Pape's esthetic, is thus rendered visible.
According to Pape, the idea is to undermine "the austerity of the ordered scheme." The irregularities of the paper strips, as well as the tonal shifts in pigment, express the variations inherent to a handmade process. Her work intimates worlds without directlly quoting them; the drawings are at once available and reticent. In The Last Letter (1998), the strips of Kozo paper are uninked; they billow out on top of each other, their delicately inked fringes suggestive of burning. A strong middle seam vertically divides the drawing into halves, which offers a satisfying physical partition and which may be read, as well, as a metaphor for separation. here, as in an almost entirely black work from 1998, entitled Between the Meadow and the Moon, the suggestion of Asian mysticism is strong, the consequence of both inferred feeling and evocative materials.
Art, as Pape sees it, reflects an essentially mysterious process, which is for the artist to imply without overtly demonstrating. Pape's achievement is to have found a way of working that cuts across preconceived categories—of drawing, of materials, of mind. She is aware that she is pushing her media so as to circumvent expected notions of what drawing should be. At the same time, she is representing, in a nearly figurative fashion, basic processes in nature, what she calls the "division and recombination involved with growth." These quiet but compelling works on paper don't so much order the world as present things as they are or, rather, as they might be, if we took the time to truly perceive them.
"The Photography of Fleeting Moments," Review by Mike Fitelson
Manhattan Times, February 17, 2005
The quiet color photographs of Sky Pape currently gracing the lobby of Hebrew Tabernacle invite the viewer to places he's never been. Sure, viewers may have visited the locations where Pape carried her digital camera, but it is unlikely they saw what she did.The Inwood resident found open spaces momentarily transformed by incident. Light dances around the hulking iron sculptures at the Dia:Beacon museum upstate. Clouds float through a river gorge in China. Even familiar locales are changed, such as Highbridge Park, bathed in fireworks during last year's Uptown Arts Stroll opening reception.Some of the images depict institutions that have collected her artwork (her fine art drawings are internationally renown), such as the Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum. But there are also a couple of curious street photographs, including one of a weathered handmade sign ridiculously advertising: "PEN CAP FOR SALE 35˘."
Most of the 18 scenes in the exhibit would not have looked the same a minute before or after she recorded it. The wind would've blown. The lighting would've shifted. Things would've been different. In this sense, the photographs depict the fragile architecture of moments.
Pape's text hints at her purpose: "I am most pleased when someone says my photographs act as a reminder to tune up one's awareness and look at thinigs in new ways."
Midway through the show, Pape seems to send a message to the viewer: She has photographed on a blue-sky canvas a skywriter spelling out "WISH YOU WERE HERE" in a gentle arc. Residual lettering from the plane's earlier pass has been smudged into illegibility by the wind. Pape is saying that these scenes float past every day unnoticed unless we take the time to open our eyes.
"The Search Is Over" Soho, NYCFor more photos, explore Other page
