2013 Workspace Program Residency catalog

dieu donné Workspace Program

2013 Workspace Program Residency

Firelei Báez, N. Dash, Fabienne Lasserre, and Saul Melman

2013 Workspace Program Residency for New York State based emerging artists

Part 1: October 24 - November 27, 2013 Part 2: December 6, 2013 - February 1, 2014 Firelei Báez N. Dash Fabienne Lasserre Saul Melman With a focus on experimentation and collaboration, Dieu Donné founded the Workspace Program in 1990 to provide emerging New York State based artists with the opportunity to explore hand papermaking and to utilize its processes to produce a body of work. In this unique program, artists work collaboratively with master papermakers, which is essential to providing artists an opportunity to create work in a medium that is outside of their traditional practice.

Top: Workspace Program Part 1: Firelei Báez & Fabienne Lasserre installation view, Dieu Donné gallery 2013 Bottom: Workspace Program Part 2: N. Dash & Saul Melman installation view, Dieu Donné gallery 2013

Firelei Báez For the pieces in the exhibition I followed an intuitive process, allowing the materials to inform the work made. I enjoy exploring new, unexpected ways of using materials, which is why I was drawn to pulp painting, marbling and collaging freshly pulled sheets. All of these techniques are usually associated with surface, but in this body of work each gesture is structurally embedded in the form. The warp and pull of different kinds of paper was also a point of interest, since they allow for a more object like, corporeal experience of paper.

– Firelei Báez Approaching paper as a ‘surrogate self’ for its corporeal qualities and similarity to skin (reacting to its environment and aging in unexpected ways) Báez created a series of large-scale works that refer to landscape, the body, and charged notions of female beauty.

Interested in the histories of paper throughout different cultures, the artist began with the reference point of the figures in Persian miniatures and scrollery. She created her own figures based on women in YouTube videos of ‘twerking’ or ‘wilding’ fights, behavior that falls outside normal feminine ideals. These figures appear in her studio practice as well as the Dieu Donné work.

Báez created the figures through a subtractive process, drawing form by removing excess pulp on the screen, which was then couched, pressed, and collaged to the base sheet while still wet.

Another innovative twist is Báez’s process of marbling pigmented pulp to create a sheet of marbled paper, where paper marbling is typically applied to the surface of the paper. Formation aid was used in a non-traditional way to slow the draining process and allow the arist to apply additional marbling and pulp painting to the top of the sheet in the deckle box while it continued to drain.

Working on several pieces simultaneously and intuitively by combining various papermaking processes and techniques, such as marbling, collaging, and pulp painting, the artist’s work evolved over the course of the residency, moving from using stencils to painting and shaping the pulp freehand, and from small to large scale. The artist said of Amy Jacobs, her studio collaborator, “Amy was an amazing collaborator-slash-magician. She made the transition from working in my studio to Dieu Donné seamless. She knows the process so well and is open to play, which allowed me to invent as I went along and just trust the materials, rather than try to impose something else on them.”

Firelei Báez was born in the Dominican Republic and now resides and works in New York. Firelei received her BFA from The Cooper Union; went to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculptures; and earned her MFA at Hunter College. She has exhibited widely across the United States, and her awards include; a residency from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, Fine Arts Work Center and a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award in Painting, among others. Her work was recently on view at The Studio Museum’s emerging artist exhibition Fore.

Images Top: Amidst the future and present there is a memory table, 2013 Pigmented abaca, cotton, and linen on abaca base sheet with radiograph opaque ink 40 x 60 inches Bottom: Firelei Báez and Studio Collaborator Amy Jacobs using marbling techniques with wet paper pulp in the Dieu Donné studio, Summer 2013.

Images Top: Untitled, 2013 Cotton paper, string, acrylic paint 3 unique works, 30 x 22 inchea, each

Bottom Left: N. Dash working with graphite and wet cotton pulp Bottom Right: Dash and Studio Collaborator Lisa Switalski embedding string between sheets of cotton paper.

N. Dash The primary focus of my residency at Dieu Donne was a series of drawings of plants that use the paper as the ground and employ mark-making elements to express plant growth.

Making paper has itself given me insight into the nature of fabric, which is the primary material of my work. Previously, my experience with cotton had predominantly been in its woven form. Here, the activity of turning the material from a pulpy liquid into a solid plane allowed me to probe the plant’s shapeshifting possibilities, while still acknowledging its sculptural nature.

In creating the works, I pulled two sheets and laid one on top of the other. They fused together to make one. With the introduction of an interruption or breach – in this instance, string drawn between the two sheets – the paper shifted into a body, with an outside and an inside, instead of what may typically be considered a front and back. The field within the seemingly flat surface opened up a dormant area that became an integral aspect of the work.

The interior of the paper thus became a hermetic space to hold the root of the plant. The uncovered line that exists above ground is the part of the plant that is exposed to the elements.

The bare line falls and asserts its contingent presence. The drawings focus equally on the plant, which is both obscured and revealed, and on the ground. Without the primal force of the ground that houses the roots, there is no plant. These pieces do not point to any heroic aspects of the natural world, but to the diminutive growth of a line (the shoot) and its support (root) -- which are, like much in nature, unseen, walked upon and underground.

I would like to thank Lisa Switalski (Studio Collaborator) for her tireless support, proficiency and expertise.

– N. Dash

N. Dash (b. 1980, Miami Beach, FL) lives and works in New York and New Mexico. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is represented by UNTITLED, New York. The artist’s work has recently been exhibited at White Flag Projects in St. Louis, MO, and has been included in group exhibitions at Alison Jacques Gallery, Peter Blum, Marianne Boesky, James Cohan Gallery, and Art: Concept Paris. Dash will have a solo exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2014.

Fabienne Lasserre

My process can be summed up as a stubborn action on materials, offset by a learned and forced flexibility towards their rebuke of my intentions. This mutual tuning of the subjective and the practical leads me to an acceptance of the uncontrolled, both in process and results. I make works that are in between sculptures and paintings, as representations of an “excluded middle”, the part that is left out when things are divided into categories. I stretch and elongate forms, arriving at shapes and volumes through pressure and touch, a blind effort to get somewhere without a plan. I warp, twist, lean, and stack because these states evoke a rich array of relations of desire, repulsion, aggression, cooperation, affection, mercy and cruelty. Many of my pieces or projects start with an interest in a material that I know very little about.

Often these materials are malleable and have a non-hierarchical structure where no part dominates or leads; like paper, for instance.

Although it is traditionally a methodical process, paper-making can leave lots of room for the unknown. We began by stretching wet sheets of brightly colored linen paper pulp over variously sized rings made out of copper tubing discarded from the heating system of my parents’ house in Montreal. My studio collaborator Lisa Switalski and I thought that the copper would oxidize against the wet paper and create interesting stains where the two materials overlapped. That didn’t happen. Instead, as the pieces dried, the shrinking paper warped the copper armature, creating taut, twisted, and colorful shapes, each one completely different, and surprisingly sturdy due to the membrane of randomly interwoven linen fibers that we used.

After a few monochromatic pieces, we started laying strips of flat colors alongside each other, purposefully not cleaning the molds so that the adjoining colors would “contaminate” each other. The finished pieces are planar, yet three-dimensional. They look like doors, mirrors, masks, distorted drums, boomerangs, or giant potato chips. However, the color disturbs any clear reference to these associations, and lives on its own.

One of the most important aspects of this project is that it was done in collaboration, hinging on fortuitous discoveries and welcome accidents, rather than a planned outcome. Lisa’s knowledge made it possible to move ahead, yet keep things open to change. Most steps of the process required two people: lifting, moving and balancing things, pressing down, pivoting, pulling. After a while, she and I developed a perfectly coordinated series of movements, which we performed smoothly and repeatedly (admittedly this choreography became wobbly as we grew tired at the end of the day!). Here we were, having just met, completely focused on doing something the nature of which was still unknown to us, together. And through pauses, conversations and laughter, learning about each other meanwhile.

– Fabienne Lasserre

Fabienne Lasserre is from Montreal, Canada and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is on the faculty of the painting department at Maryland Institute College of Art. Reviews of her work have appeared in Artforum. com, the Brooklyn Rail, the Village Voice, and the New York Sun. Lasserre holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and is represented by Jeff Bailey Gallery, where she currently has a solo exhibition. She has been included in group exhibitions at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and Sikkema Jenkins & Co., currently has work in Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year 1, curated by Phong Bui, and will have work on view in forthcoming exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT) and Contemporary Art Museum, Houston.

Images Top Left: Are (Brown, Yellow, Red), 2013 Flax and pigmented linen, copper tubing 41 x 30 x ¼ inches Top Right: Fabienne Lasserre preparing to pull a sheet of paper.

Bottom Right: Lasserre and Studio Collaborator Lisa Switalski working in the Dieu Donné wet studio.

Images Top Left: (Untitled), 2013 Ice, pigment, and abaca 29 ¼ x 21 ¾ inches Top Right: Saul Melman placing pigmented ice into a wet sheet of abaca paper.

Bottom Right: Melman and his collaborator, Artistic Director Paul Wong, reviewing works in the DIeu Donné wet studio.

Saul Melman Papermaker’s Tear \pā-pər-, mā-kər\ /z/ \’tîr\ Also known as Vatman’s Tear. A drop of water that inadvertently creates a mark in the otherwise unblemished surface of freshly pulled paper.

On my first day as a resident at Dieu Donné I learned a term that can’t be found in the dictionary, and escapes the omniscience of the internet. It evoked the elemental importance of water and the opportunity for chance in the exacting and alchemical process of papermaking.

Water is an essential yet counter-intuitive material in paper since it is removed from the final product. But before the delicate fibers in paper align themselves and chemically bond together to create a strong web, paper is more liquid than solid. During my residency I developed two projects that engaged with paper on its own terms by using the materials already present: water and fiber.

I chose a type of Japanese yarn that is particularly strong because of the complex helical structure of intertwined linen strands from which it is woven. I pressed tangled webs of this yarn into clay, and used the impressions to make rubber molds. The powerful hydraulic press at Dieu Donné forced cotton pulp into the rubber mold so that the paper’s web of fibers captured the fiber of the yarn in intricate detail, creating a low-relief sculpture.

While the paper was in a semi-liquid state, I imprinted it with shards of ice. The Dieu Donné staff generously shared the space in their kitchen freezer, alongside their coffee and dumplings, so I could make large blocks of ice in milk cartons, until eventually, I brought in my own freezer and specialized trays I created for ice-making.

On the first day of experimenting with the ice and pulp, Paul Wong, my Dieu Donné studio collaborator, orchestrated a multiplicity of permutations including the clever invention of a double-sided deckle box. With his extensive knowledge of paper making, Paul offered instrumental guidance as I used pressure, temperature and gravity to drive interactions between pulp, pigment and ice.

Prior to the residency I had no experience making paper, but learning the new language of this material was not unfamiliar. In my studio I also subject materials to experimental methods of making - a process fundamental to my practice – so that the resulting work embodies the story of its own evolution.

– Saul Melman

Saul Melman lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He received an MFA from Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts - Bard College in 2009. He has shown sculpture, installation and performance at Whitney Museum of American Art, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and MoMAPS1 where he has a long-term installation. His work is featured in the Nov/ Dec 2013 Art Issue of The Believer magazine.

Exhibitions 2013 Workspace Program Part 1: Firelei Báez & Fabienne Lasserre October 24 – November 27, 2013 Reception: Thursday, October 24, 6–8 pm 2013 Workspace Program Part 2: N. Dash & Saul Melman December 6, 2013 – February 1, 2014 Reception: Thursday, December 12, 6–8 pm

Dieu Donné Board of Directors and Staff Susan Gosin, Founder & Co-Chair Martina Batan, Co-Chair Samantha C. Smith, Co-Chair Max Munn, Treasurer Ken Hudes, Secretary Sue Ann Evans James Selfe Sylvia Shepard Kathleen Flynn, Executive Director Paul Wong, Artistic Director Bridget Donlon, Program Manager Amy Jacobs, Studio Collaborator & Education Manager David Mendoza, Gallery Assistant Lisa Switalski, Studio Collaborator & Production Manager

Credits Cover image: Firelei Báez working in the Dieu Donné studio, Summer 2013 Exhibition publication written and designed by Bridget Donlon, unless otherwise noted.

Workspace Program Residency Established in 1990, the Workspace Program offers annual residencies to New York State emerging artists to create new work in handmade paper. The primary goals of this program are to encourage emerging artists to explore the creative possibilities of handmade paper and to develop this art form through a process of collaboration and experimentation.

The Workspace Program is presented to the public through an annual exhibition of works produced in this residency program, as well as through print, digital, and online formats.

For more information about the Workspace Program, or to learn how to apply, visit residencies.dieudonne.org.

Dieu Donné Dieu Donné is a non-profit contemporary artist workspace dedicated to the creation, promotion, and preservation of new art made using hand papermaking techniques.

The organization’s primary services and programs are devoted to working with mid-career and emerging artists through collaborative residency opportunities to develop new, innovative methods of papermaking within the medium and the greater world of contemporary art. These programs provide a significant educational opportunity for contemporary artists by engaging them actively in the approaches to hand papermaking that Artistic Director Paul Wong has developed through collaborations with artists since our inception in 1976. Located in New York City, Dieu Donné houses a professional papermaking studio as well as a gallery, archive, and administrative offices.

Support for Dieu Donné The artistic and educational programs at Dieu Donné are made possible with public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council; and Foundation support including: Lily Auchincloss Foundation, Milton & Sally Avery Arts Foundation, Inc, Bloomberg Philanthropies, Cowles Charitable Trust, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The Minnow Fund, The New York Community Trust, The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts and The Partnership Fund for New York City along with major individual support.

Dieu Donné 315 West 36th Street New York, NY 10018 t 212 226 0573 f 212 226 6088 www.dieudonne.org residencies.dieudonne.org