Tyger Tyger Gallery’s group exhibition of works on paper, I will tell you mine, features works by 27 artists curated through an open call earlier this year. Working across an impressive range of applications, methods, and materials, the selected artists engage paper’s malleability and structure with natural and synthetic paper substrates that are variously painted, drawn, and printed upon with wet and dry media. Paper can be collaged, embossed, gilded, stitched, and torn, with marks that stain, scribble, tickle, glide and render- and this show explores those possibilities through thematic currents of contemplation, intimacy, and wonder resonating through its humble yet potent aura.
Across the works in I will tell you mine, transcendent landscapes provide illuminated spaces of refuge, nature proliferates as figures swim and rest in engulfing spaces, and abstractions pulsate with color theory and pattern.
Among the abstract offerings, Taro Takizawa and Sue Crawford’s radiating patterns riff on reverberations within the natural world—Taro influenced by the reflections in water and Sue inspired by topographical maps and geological strata. Limited palettes in soft gradients contrast angular, stacked stripes and striations as nature’s movements are transcribed into rhythmic patterns across a flat plane.
The show features a wealth of landscapes. Christopher Burk, Sarabeth Noggle, and Kaysha Siemens cultivate ethereal visions of those glowy, transitory moments from day to night and back. Here, conifers are silhouetted by star-speckled skies, sparse trees hang on to their last leaves before the winter reset in a dim forest gloaming, and clouds form and dissipate across peach and violet sunsets. Heady and alluring, these spaces conjure crisp, winter air against skin, the smell of a fresh snowfall, or the dazzle of a moonrise and falling star against an electric blue evening sky.
Paper is a shape-shifter at its most foundational level: it is physical, structural, and utterly malleable. Suzanne Dittenber’s sheep shearing paintings are made with pigmented pulp, Kaysha Siemen’s egg tempera skyscapes are painted on Karst paper made from recycled limestone, and Kimberly Tolbert explores the texture of Abaca paper with indigo-dyed weaving suspended between layers of natural fibers.
Navi Naisang and Melissa Mote Glosup’s hyperpigmented figure-in-landscape feature dream visions of Tarot-esque implications while Petey Brown’s small gems of quirky humor and realness bring us crashing into the present with her chaotic image-within-the-image compositions commenting on the ubiquitousness of the camera phones with which we tell and hold the stories our daily lives.
The exhibition title itself comes from poet-sage Mary Oliver, whose poem “Wild Geese” reminds us of our collectivity as we navigate emotionally complex existence.
“...Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. / Meanwhile the world goes on. / Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain / are moving across the landscapes, / over the prairies and the deep trees, / the mountains and the rivers.” - from “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver
I will tell you mine is on display through May 26, 2024.
Featuring: Yoon Nam, Taro Takizawa, Sue Crawford, Sarabeth Noggle, Petey Brown, Suzanne Dittenber, Peter Roux, Paul Acevedo Gomez, Molly Sawyer, Melissa Mote Glosup, Laura Snyder, Kimberly Tolbert, Kaysha Siemens, Erin Neel Newton, John Paul Kesling, Jessie Shinn, Jane Tingle Broderick, Jacquelyn Strycker, Gabrielle Roshelli, Erin Keane, Danielle Rante, Christopher Burk, Bob Barnett, Anna Pietrzak, Amy Sacksteder, Navi Naisang, & Melanie Norris
