Ro2 Art is proud to present Paper Cuts, a solo exhibition featuring new works by artist Candace Hicks. The show will run from February 16 - March 16, 2019. The opening reception will be held Saturday, February 16, from 7-10 p.m. at Ro2 Art Gallery’s Cedars neighborhood location at 1501 S. Ervay St. Dallas, TX 75215.

Candace Hicks creates paper craft compositions that focus on subverting the traditional themes typically found in crime book cover illustrations. In Paper Cuts, Hicks utilizes her time spent reading fiction and the background in book art to mirror inequalities that lie in the literature we choose to consume. She strives to match the unsentimental manner in which fictional victims are treated, specifically relating to the way women in fiction are often sexualized unto death.

Believing that the stories we tell each other can reveal more about our values and biases than mundane experience, I mine genre fictions to uncover the subtle ways that literature reflects inequalities. My recent project, Paper Cuts, a series of paper craft compositions, offers alternatives to crime book cover illustrations. Fictional victims are represented in my work as dispassionately as they are depicted in stories, often subordinated by the setting in which they are situated. Though men are much more likely to die as a result of violence than women, young women remain the preferred victims in mystery novels. Edgar Allen Poe famously said, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” and the spectacle of female death, evident in the way female bodies are discovered in fiction, usually displayed, sometimes erotically, perpetuates the objectification of women unto death. Employing a tradition of craft that is still viewed by many as separate from fine art, the works are made entirely of cut paper. I borrow from still life and landscape tradition to position the paper “paintings” in the history of art.

With a background in book art, Candace Hicks’s work is based on reading fiction. With the exhibition Read Me at Lawndale Art Center, Hicks opened the book form into a room-sized interactive installation in which viewers pieced together a puzzle of narrative to find the correct solution. The Locked Room at Living Arts in Tulsa focused on a specific genre of literature the “locked room” mystery, and visitors were tasked with the challenge to find the means of metaphorically escaping the gallery. Egress at Pump Project explored literary connections and coincidences through sculpture and text. Her most recent installation Many Mini Murder Scenes at Women and Their Work immersed visitors in an experience in detection. She is the Coordinator of Foundations at Stephen F. Austin State University. She earned a Master of Fine Art degree in Printmaking from Texas Christian University. Her artist’s books are in collections including the Museum of Modern Art New York, Bainbridge Museum, Spencer Museum of Art, and many university special collections including Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.