Exhibition of Drawings by Sky Pape to Open at June Kelly Gallery

NEW YORK, NY.- Water Works: Surface Tension, an exhibition of drawings by Sky Pape that demonstrates once again the artist’s ability to push the boundaries of the medium, will open at the June Kelly Gallery on February 5. It will remain on view through March 9.

Pape creates her drawings by an unconventional process — working on the floor and blowing ink through tubes and funnels onto handmade paper from Japan, Korea and Nepal.

“In a sense,” Pape says, “I breathe life into these drawing, using my lungs to propel the ink. But as much as they reflect my physical being, biological forms and systems, they also elicit a broader, innate recognition of the natural world. Growth and decay, beauty and brutality are the rudiments of this language. These forms and lines divulge our connectedness with nature, a reminder of our shared fragility.”

For Pape, drawing is the core of any art, and her innovative approach displays both experimentation and expressiveness. “The idea of drawing with the paper instead of just upon it is characteristic of my approach to my materials,” she comments. “I draw upon the unconscious for forms skimming the surface of recognizability, which act as a threshold to aspects of individual and contemporary human experience.”

“I use the line as an isolated gesture with an almost independent presence,” she says. “I try to integrate the forms with an intuitive energy that references language – both abstract and minimal. And I see my work as a collaboration with those distant paper-makers in Asia.”

Pape, a native of Toronto, Canada, lives and works in New York City. She studied art at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and at Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York. She will spend the month of March on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy.

She has shown in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her work is represented in many public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, Dyke Industries, Little Rock, Arkansas and Cirque du Soleil, Montreal, Canada.

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