Paper View, A Show of Works on Paper

orean artist Gahae Park calls her sculptural paper compositions scores.  With the implied grid as her substrate, Park cuts out and folds tiny colored squares, lines, and dots. These airy and intensely meditative chromatic sequences on white can indeed be understood as notational and musical: chroma is conceived as sound; the 'notes' are colored lines or dots that emit vibrations of different intensities.  The result is a synaesthetic index of geometric units.   By calling these compositions scores Park not only elides the term "composition" as a common arena of creative enterprise in both music and art, she leaves the interpretation of how to 'play' the score open.  The composer Erik Satie, whose musical notations were left open to freer interpretation by the player, was careful to distinguish himself as a "phonometrician" (someone who measures sound) rather than the generic "musician." His designation cues us to the importance of the nominal as a specific directive to a new way of playing, listening, or, in this case, looking.  Park's series of compositions chart variations, progression, and the evolution of systems as a product of practice and play. The collages of poet Jeffrey Cyphers Wright in the next room yield radically different results.  Wright, former student of Allen Ginsberg, conceives of collage as a plasmic space where recurring images (like Tinkerbell and graffiti) and detritus bubble up to the surface. The stylized repetition of certain motifs can, at times, stifle their subliminal play.   Paper View, A Show of Works on Paper, August 27 through September 24 at A Gathering of the Tribes, 285 East 3rd Street, 2nd floor, (between Avenues C and D).

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