As updated assessments of established, popular trends in contemporary art go, the Philadelphia Art Alliance's "Paper[space]" is the one of the best of its kind. It doesn't try to be an all-inclusive survey of artists working with paper as their primary medium (a trend under way for a good 15 years) - such prominent contemporary paper manipulators as Aric Obrosey and Lane Twitchell are missing.
Instead, it looks to the efforts of those who have come of age thinking unquestioningly of crafts as fine art. The works of the eight artists in this exhibition are also surprisingly formal and abstract, with none of the emotional punch of the silhouetted slave narratives of Kara Walker, for example.
Natasha Bowdoin is a typically cool customer. You can see that her sprawling but super-meticulously arranged constructions of painted strips of paper - including playing cards - refer to Native American mythology, but they're experienced first as remarkably flowing, painterly works that occupy a wall in much the same way a gigantic, pinned-down butterfly specimen might.
Dawn Gavin's manipulated maps and passports do in fact use pins, not to fasten them to the wall but to mark areas as she sees fit, and to make the viewer reconsider the structures by which he or she, too, is bound. Each modest piece is a reinvention of geography according to Gavin, and there seems to be a logic behind her new worlds. It's easy to suspend belief because you lose yourself in these works.
Leslie Mutchler and Sarah Julig are the sculptors of the group. Mutchler casts paper pulp into cards with slots on their edges, reminiscent of the ones in the Eameses' House of Cards game, and arranges them to evoke much larger structures. (Her multiple, overlapping forms, and Bowdoin's, seem to allude to the repetitive manner in which people often encounter pieces of paper, as in the pages of a book.) Julig makes linear, cut-paper sculptures that can collapse or expand, suggesting undersea creatures and origami.
There is some serious cutting here, rivaling that of any top crafter. Jin Lee's overlapping veils of intricately cut paper hang from the ceiling, one in front of another, suggesting a forest of some depth, perhaps covered in snow. The leaves and other plant forms perfectly arranged in a display box in Nami Yamamoto's calmly beautiful, sci-fi-ish Radiant Flux could pass for the real thing. The patterns in Hunter Stabler's precise, delicate cut-outs are wonders of symmetry. Donna Ruff burns patterns into pages of books and plain paper, and her technique, though different from those of Lee, Yamamoto and Stabler, is similarly exacting and beautifully realized.
You sense that all eight of these artists are still developing, still on the cusp of something. But that's the point of show like this. And you know you'll meet them all again.
Academic panorama
Sande Webster Gallery has yet to master the art of installation. The dozens of works in "Yesterday and Today: Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Alumni Invitational Exhibition," by 37 artists, are mounted literally all over the place, but not with the eccentric charm of the Barnes collection. Tiny paintings hang beneath behemoths; the wonderful works are often the hardest to spot.
There are many interesting paintings here, by such accomplished academy alums as Bo Bartlett, Barkley Hendricks, Elizabeth Osborne, Moe Brooker, Murray Dessner, Charles Searles, Ben Kamihira, Bill Scott, Quentin Morris, David Rothermel, and Henry Ossawa Tanner. You can easily see why the academy continues to produce representational artists, and you also wonder how Dessner, a Rothko descendant, and monochromist Morris emerged from that training.
If contributions from such graduates as Kocot and Hatton, a conceptual team, and the abstract painters Anne Seidman and Barry Goldberg had been included, they might have shed more light on the academy's aesthetic diversity.
Sarah Morton, a recent graduate and a painter in the tradition of Thomas Eakins, but with her own twist on uncomfortable family scenes, is a standout with her painting The Bear in the Mint.