Running with Scissors: Cut Paper in Contemporary Art and Design
Thursday October 22, 6:30 PM
Free with Thursday pay-what-you-wish admission

Print magazine and MAD present Slash artists Rob Carter, Andrea Dezsö and Mark Fox, discussing their diverse approaches to the traditional technique of paper-cutting. Moderated by David Revere McFadden, MAD’s Chief Curator, with writer Claire Lui.

Statements from the Artists:

Rob Carter
My videos and photographs examine paper as both a physical object and a malleable document of the real. The work employs stop-motion animation, time-lapse video, and photographic "re-constructions" to spotlight the iconic and political structures in our urban environment, especially sports stadia, skyscrapers, churches, and other historical landmarks. The most recent work draws parallels between the inspiration of the natural world and the human manipulation and control of it in the past, present, and future.

Andrea Dezsö
I started making one-of-a-kind books in 1992 as an exchange student in London. In my "tunnel books," cut-paper scenes are arranged in expandable layers, creating a miniature theater stage for presenting the narratives inside. My tunnel books reveal imagined worlds; scenarios arising from the subconscious, based on my personal experience—physical, psychological, spiritual, and the strange in-betweens; living in my body, in my mind, dreams, memories, and anxieties, hopes, obsessions. They refer back to my childhood, which never entirely went away.

Mark Fox
My first cut-paper work developed out of a practice of examining images otherwise considered marginal or secondary. This was accomplished by accumulating random marks, stains, ancillary images, peripheral doodles, and incidental paint splatters, created on "scrap" paper while making more formal drawings in the studio. I then cut these images from their paper grounds, paying acute attention to the edges these marks created. These cut images were then arranged according to parameters I set for myself, which were faithful to the random nature of the mark-making itself. Throughout my career, beginning with my performance-based pieces in the early 1990s, I have been concerned with the theme of manipulation. The cut-paper work resulted in a kind of reverse manipulation wherein the process generated by-products that manipulated my movement and time.

After following the dictates of this work for a number of years, I am now concerned with transcribing and reevaluating various religious, political, and mythological texts, which describe accepted truths. By taking a razor to these transcribed doctrines, I am seeking to examine the edges of these dogmas; to scrutinize the ways in which their meanings and implications underpin contemporary culture. In reassembling these doctrines into forms that have meaning to me, I am also returning to the issue of manipulation and the constantly shifting locus of control between artist and subject. I often mount these forms on structures that reference vernacular materials, such as cardboard, plywood, sawhorses, and other construction supplies. I am concerned here with the irony of how seemingly simple lives and quotidian concerns often support (and are supported by) lofty and even preposterous dogma that is accepted at face value as Truth.