In the early months of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order, my friend Suzanne Silver and I began a collaborative mail exchange. We made works for each other, then replied to ones received. From this looping call and response, a collection of small works accumulated, embodying our experiences of loss, sorrow, vulnerability, and rage: a living record of our response to the pandemic and the epidemic of anti-black racism and police violence.
In November 2020, we organized this exchange into an exhibition, Return to Sender, for the Columbus Printed Arts Center. The Center is in a former factory that manufactured fire engines at the turn of the century. Working together, we wore masks in this yawning space but mostly we worked alone. Over the course of three months, we took turns making and installing new works, continuing to build from our collaboration’s central concerns. Language of the wound was central to the exhibition: prick, puncture, gash, slash. These words became figures of speech, signaling blind spots, erasures, and trap doors—semaphores of vulnerability and resistance.
Folds emerged from these experiences. Suzanne and I wanted to bring more voices into the fold, as it were. We extended an invitation to thirty artists and writers to participate in the exhibition with this prompt:
Unfolding is key to our curatorial premise: each participant will create a work and send it to the next as an inspiration for theirs, setting into motion a collaborative constellation. All works must be sent through the mail, either in a standard size envelope or a form no larger than 9 x 12”. With inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and Harry Smith’s paper airplanes, each artist will be prompted to activate the fold as form and concept and consider the mailed object’s potential to expand and collapse, travel and collect. By embracing the conditions of scale and risk inherent in shipping, the works will explore the aesthetics and ethics of contingency and serendipity and repair.
Folds returns to the intimate act of mail correspondence while mapping a wider expanse for collaboration. Each artist had a week to respond to their received work before sending theirs to the next participant. With the demand for a quick response, we hoped to create the conditions for intuitive leaps. We were interested in the productive pressure of constraint and how to tap the meaning of fold as an experience of congregation. The project launched from Siena, Italy with Silver’s Illuminated Newspaper in June 2023 and concluded in Columbus, OH with my Assembly in August 2024, traveling throughout the U.S. in between.
For over a year, the conversation unfurled and shapeshifted through a range of media including books, collage, drawing, painting, photography, sculpture, and writing. While the exhibition was produced in chronological time, its sense of time is elastic—pausing, repeating, buckling, stretching, dissolving. Spurred by the scale restrictions, all of the works are delicately tactile, and many offer multiple presentations. They can be flattened, doubled, pleated, and transformed from two to three dimensions. The unfolding spun a twisting pattern rather than a straight line of associations. Unlike the construction of an exquisite corpse, every work talks back and poses a question. Some works echoed their predecessors while others pivoted. The ephemera of daily life like newspapers and handwritten correspondence appear and reappear. The news itself became fodder: the war in Gaza, the fight for reproductive health care justice, the migration crisis. The cosmological and the spiritual leaking into the everyday.
A fold is a material memory, a crease that can’t be undone. Folds convenes around the hopeful act of care and connection, holding the history of being held.
Participating artists include Erica Baum, Sophia Chai, Moyra Davey, Amber Elison, Christine Heindl, Sara Hess, Christine Hume, Rhea Karam, Justine Kurland, Dionne Lee, Laura Larson, Laura Lisbon, Mary Lum, Aspen Mays, Klea McKenna, Christian Patterson, Camille Paulhan, Jenny Perlin, Dani & Sheilah ReStack, Julia Schwartz, Lizzie Scott, Suzanne Silver, Lydia Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Luke Stettner, Jo-ey Tang, Catherine Taylor, Carmen Winant, and Vanessa Woods.
Project: ARTspace is located at 99 Madison Avenue, 8th Floor, New York, NY and is open Monday - Friday, 11am - 5pm.
A catalog is forthcoming, designed by Ry Wharton.
Opening reception will be held Wednesday, September 25 from 6-8 PM and the exhibition will be on view until November 13.
Hope to see you soon!