David Krut Projects is pleased to present A fluid space projective space, the second solo exhibition of Chakaia Booker’s hand-cut and assembled chine collé prints at the gallery. The title of this exhibition comes from Booker’s process of cutting and rearranging materials to create a corpus-like cluster of pattern and texture. She describes this process as fluid, and subject to the rhythm and flow of discovering new shapes, colors, and compositions through the offerings of the printmaking process.
The term projective space refers to how the perspective of the human eye translates a three-dimensional reality through to a two-dimensional lens or plane. In these works, Booker pushes the boundaries of this unique relationship between the sculptural world and the projective flatness of the image, linking her process of creating these works-on-paper to that of her large-scale sculptural works she is best known for – assemblages made of discarded rubber tires that are cut, looped, and layered into towering beings.
Each work-on-paper is unique and created in collaboration with Master Printer Phil Sanders of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, a collaboration that began in 2009. Under Sanders’ guidance and printmaking expertise, Booker takes full advantage of the tools in the printmaking workshop, marking woodblocks with drills, chisels, and grinders before inking them to create elaborate patterned papers from which she excavates her cut and rearranged pieces. The resulting lyrical compositions of finely layered Japanese papers act as emblems of her intuitive process - creating an optical duel between the two-dimensional picture plane, and the physical fact of paper’s raw materiality.
Chakaia Booker received a B.A. in Sociology from Rutgers University (1976) and a MFA from the City College of New York (1993). She was selected for the Whitney Biennial in 2000, awarded the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2002 and received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2005. Booker’s work has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally, with select solo exhibitions including: Garment District Alliance Broadway Public Art Commission, The National Museum of Women in the Arts; Milwaukee Art Museum; The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Queens Museum of Art; Katonah Museum of Art and Storm King Arts Center. She has been included in group exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Art and Design, Bronx Museum of the Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is the collections of the following selected institutions: the Bronx Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Orleans Museum of Art; Newark Museum and The Snite Museum of Art. Booker lives in New York City and her studio is located in Allentown, Pennsylvania.