Jeff Wielki: More Than Surface
More Than Surface
Jeff Wielki
on
Elevating the Paper Object by AUArts staff, faculty and students curated by Jonathan Creese
Paper is so much a part of our everyday lives, it rarely demands more than a passing thought. It is mundane, boring even, and although we don’t think about it frequently, it is also hard to imagine a world without paper. Paper can hold important information, art, maps, and secrets. It also blends into the background as advertising, packaging, and scraps in our junk drawer for scrawling a reminder list on. We use paper and promptly throw it away when our momentary need has been fulfilled. It is a vehicle for something else and quite impermanent. Bringing attention to an object people generally prefer to be cheap and disposable is difficult. Jonathan Creese’s curation, Elevating the Paper Object does what it promises.
On display here are dozens, perhaps 100, individual paper objects. Each is the result of momentary specificity; an individual artist’s approach to using the paper in their practice. Sheets of paper have been used as tools, frames, sculptures, and surfaces. Some are folded, extending the paper beyond two dimensions to become a chain, card, or origami. Others have been used as studies and experiments. A number seem to have been an aid—art adjacent—like a palette used to support other work that may not be seen here. A few come across as being quite conceptual, but we will never know their individual stories. The paper sheets in the display operate as a plinth. Something used to simultaneously support and fade into the background. But like the plinth, it is still there. It can’t be completely ignored. The title of this exhibit guides us there as well, but because the diversity of work is extremely broad, that difference in approaches brings focus back to the one thing common across them all—the paper itself.
Pretend for a moment that you walk into a room where 100 clones are wearing outfits they made for themselves. The conversations here are most likely started by way of the differences in their outfits, calling out what is visibly unique. At some point, for the conversations to be interesting they need to go beyond ornamented facade and examine something deeper underneath. Elevating the Paper Object exists parallel to this. Once the multitude of surface manipulation has been reviewed, the conversation moves to the material.
This paper is not what is kept in a junk drawer for scribbling a grocery list on. It is handmade, fibrous, textured, and considered. These sheets would not be misrepresented if they were referred to as nice. They are the size of a standard sheet awaiting activation in a LaserJet printer, but that is not this material’s fate. To make such a lovely object carefully and precisely approximately 100 times is intense labor and investment. To then release these carefully constructed objects to artists expecting transcendence is a generous leap of trust and faith. That transcendence is not achieved by any single work here. Instead, it arrives through the volume of work in this display. That volume allows individual sheets of paper to be interpreted as a multiple, with layers stacked upon it. Multiple approaches to the use of a multiple, by multiple artists.
Multiples tend not to have the authenticity of an original, they sit as a group in opposition to the individual. Supply and demand dictate that copies of an object diminish the value of each existing multiple. Paradoxically, additional copies reinforce their collective power. The work performed on each piece in Elevating the Paper Object highlights individual identity in an anonymous mob of what is, at its foundation, the exact same thing. In this gallery's context, the paper objects are both singular works of art and multiples in a series.
The dozens of paper objects form a matrix of approaches reminiscent of Richard Serra’s verb list. This was a list of “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process" (Serra). Those elements which Serra expected from his own list are in view here. Every approach contained in Creese’s curation contributes to a stream of consciousness of collective artistic approach. Creese has asked, what does one do with a single sheet of paper? The result is a literal laundry list, hanging by clothes pegs. Individual ideas developed on individual sheets. They come into focus the way photographs develop in darkrooms; hung on lines after having been through their development process baths.
Paper as object, surface, and material makes one think about the boundaries placed on art, the restrictions artists place on themselves, and the limits of the material. Whether dimensions are respected, manipulated or distorted results from choices made by the artist. As with any piece, some of the conversation within each work oscillates between the material’s pressure on the artist, and the artist’s choices imposed on the material. Art on paper tends to be about the content made from or upon that material, not the paper itself. Few of these individual works alone would have demanded a reflection on the material immediately. En masse the paper object becomes the thread binding them all together. The material is seen because there is such a broad diversity of process.
Jonathan Creese’s Elevating the Paper Object expressly encourages “upending” our relationship with paper, but it can disrupt so much more. It is not a stretch to walk away from this curated display and think about objects we take for granted every day. This exhibition elevates not just the paper hung behind the gallery glass, but the paper hiding in our junk drawer as well. Intentional elevation of the mundane builds appreciation and reinforces purpose for us and the objects in our lives. An individual sheet of paper can be vulnerable to outside forces, but many together, manipulated individually, become a community with strength, depth and aura. Material consideration makes us realize that the paper object can be as remarkable as the work performed on it. Reconsidering assumptions and studying what can be easily overlooked allows us to better analyze the world around us. Paying deeper attention we might ask, why is there a room full of 100 clones?
Richard Serra. (2022). Mondays with MoMA. Mondays With MoMA. https://www.moma.org/momaorg/shared/pdfs/docs/learn/mondays/Richard-Serra-Verblist-charades.pdf
Check out the archive and documentation for the show written about above:
About the Author:
Jeff Wielki is a visual artist in his final year of study as a sculpture major at the Alberta University of the Arts. His sculptural practice examines systems of control, value, and power as a critique of how human systems coexist and conflict with what are considered natural systems.