GREENSBORO - 'Art on Paper," a Weatherspoon Art Museum biennial event that dates back four decades, always proves a fascinating glimpse of the possibilities of an ostensibly simple medium, as well as an engaging juxtaposition of regional, national and international artists.
One portion of the show invites UNC-Greensboro faculty members to participate, another portion is a competitive juried invitational, and yet another is specifically curated. The combination allows for a rich, rounded survey and attractively mixes the works of national and international artists with those closer to home.
The surprises lie in the unexpected combinations of media and new ways of "drawing." More than a few artists have taken paper to sculptural levels, and some works cover several feet of wall space.
It is also heartening to see strong representation from artists whose works have been seen in various Triangle galleries. They hold their own against works from major metropolitan centers, which shows a heightening of sophistication in the area's artists and art market.
Mario Marzan, a UNC-CH post-doctoral fellow, is represented by a set of three works mounted on wood supports. Their delicate swirling vortexes and trajectories deal with the idea of storms, both literally and metaphorically.
Branch Gallery of Durham's artist Joshua Abelow's freely drawn, gestural, continuous-stroke pencil portraits aptly capture their subjects with a remarkable economy of means. Katy Clove, who was featured in a 2006 solo show at Branch, is represented by white-on-white figural cutouts with delicately singed edges. The double figure, from her new "Fugitive" series, appears as a doppelg…nger mysteriously menaced by birds.
New York-based Steve McClure's wonderful small drawings have been featured at Craven Allen Gallery in Durham for several years. At the Weatherspoon, his work takes on a larger scale. The moody, brooding dark umber Rorschach blotlike washes in "Animula Vagula Blandula" seem to depict scenes from a mythic culture whose ruins are now regarded by the modern men in topcoats and hats. A propped-up wooden wall on the far side of the picture plane serves to imply both a scene from a play and the scene's impermanence.
Visitors to Raleigh's Gallery C will know Asheville artist Kenn Kotara's elegant work, and those familiar with Center/Gallery, a Carrboro cooperative operating until the mid-1980s, will recognize Beatrice Schall's touch. Her delicate dress-pattern-based images appear here.
"Art on Paper" has other dimensions, geographic and otherwise.
Japanese artist Noriko Ambe's "Na-Mu" finds sculptural uses for books, opening them and carving into their pages to create poetic topographies of pages. Elise Engler's "Virology Lab" provides an interesting take on drawing a room. Her "lab" is a gridded inventory of meticulous, quirkily drawn objects, a log of the room's contents in which all references to perspective have no relevance.
There are plenty of beautifully drawn pictures, in the conventional sense, such as Joan Linder's "Red Rope." But even here, we are challenged by the configurations of rope as they wrap around a missing figure. "New Face in Hell" by Violet Hopkins, a minute colored pencil drawing mounted on aluminum, attracts double-take attention because it is as precisely rendered as a photograph, and then one realizes its sunset glory is actually the aftermath of what appears to be an atomic blast.
New York rising star Ryan McGinness' layered logolike silkscreen and letterpress on paper importantly represents the up-to-the-minute New York street pulse.
Perhaps Canadian artist Roula Partheniou's "Candy Wrapper" best sums up the spirit of "Art on Paper." It's a waxy vellum sheet of hand-drawn orange logos, crumpled on the floor as one enters the space. It answers to the pop art spirit of Claes Oldenberg's oversized objects but challenges us, too, in its subtle suggestion of environmental concerns.
With "Art on Paper," nothing is quite as it may seem.