Elisa Contemporary Art is pleased to present our new gallery exhibit, Paper Cuts. This group show features four artists all creating dimensional artwork from cut paper. The exhibit opens on Thursday, February 15 and runs through April 26 at the Riverdale NY Gallery. The featured artists are: Amy Genser, Ana Marie Hernando, Don Morris and Heidi Whitman.

The exhibit highlights the intricate and highly detailed processes of creating dimensional work from Paper. Our artists use knives and scissors to carefully sculpt each paper. The interconnectedness of each element creates the patterns that draw the viewer into the work with shadows adding additional drama and dimension.

Amy Genser creates dimensional artwork with paper and paint to explore her obsession with texture, pattern, and color. Using techniques she has developed, she tears, cuts, rolls, stacks and collages small tubes of combined handmade papers to present intricate abstractions inspired by the imperfect perfection of the natural world around her. Her patterns are sourced from coral reefs, flowing water and rock formations, satellite images and biological cellular processes. Several of the works on exhibit including “Watch Out for Sea Creatures” and “The Tide is Coming to Grab You” represent Genser’s favorite color palette, “Beach”.

Heidi Whitman’s paper constructions resemble city grids, ancient ruins and blueprints, but they also act as metaphors for the complicated processes of the mind. According to Whitman, “The structure of the city and the structure of the mind are conflated in my paper constructions. I’m interested in states of mind, how experience is translated into thought, how memories are layered, and how dreams jumble reality. Contemporary city grids and plans of ancient ruins are layered and edited along with references to mental networks… Networks of hyper-connectivity are the maps of the contemporary world whether these networks are in the structure of the city, the mind, or the internet. In my reimagined places shape and shadow interact invoking memory, presence, and absence.” These constructions are built from drawings in ink, gouache, and acrylic, carefully cut with a blade or small scissors, and intricately reconstructed with glue and pins.

For Don Morris, his former training as a plastic surgeon has provided the precision for his comic book constructions. Each piece is a multi-dimensional and textural work of art. From a distance, one sees a mass of bright colors and waves of patterns. As one traverses around the art, intriguing and surprising shadows are seen. Upon closer inspection, a story unfolds as the images of super heroes and characters of the comic book can be seen flying, struggling, and climbing in small fragments and vignettes. Word bubbles from the comic book text are carefully selected and are clearly visible throughout the pieces.