"Sky Pape: Drawing Breath"
2006-12-16 until 2007-01-16
June Kelly Gallery
New York, NY, USA United States of America

An exhibition entitled Drawing Breath by Sky Pape — provocative drawings on paper that demonstrate once again the artist’s ability to push the boundaries of the medium — opened at the June Kelly Gallery on December 15 and will remain on view through January 16, 2007. Pape creates her drawings by an unconventional process -- blowing ink through a thin tube onto handmade paper from Japan and Nepal. “In a sense,” Pape says, “I breathe life into these drawings, using my lungs to propel the ink. But as much as they reflect my insides, implying arterial systems and biological forms, they also elicit a broader, innate recognition of the natural world – plants, creatures, coastlines, and rivers. Growth and decay, beauty and brutality are the rudiments of this language. These lines and forms 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. Pape employs the line as an isolated gesture with an almost independent presence. She then integrates her lines and cutouts with an intuitive energy that references language – both abstract and minimal.

Pape admits to being fascinated with both the complex discipline of drawing and the handmade papers she uses. “The idea of drawing with the paper instead of just upon it is characteristic of my approach to my materials,” she says.

She finds a formidable connection and meaning from working with the same creative materials that have been essential to our most ancient civilized societies. She views her work as a collaboration with those distant paper-makers in Japan and Nepal.

Pape says that drawing is her most fluent expression, and that by using familiar materials like paper, ink and graphite in unconventional ways, she expands both her definition of drawing, and her growing vocabulary of this vital language.

Pape, a native of Toronto, Canada, lives and works in New York City. She studied art at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and at Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York. 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, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California.

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