Tacoma Arts In Review: Spaceworks: Paper Cutouts and the Urban Space
Spaceworks Tacoma has been pairing artists and empty storefronts for a year now, enlivening downtown and encouraging reflection on the use of city space in relation to community. Artists Celeste Cooning and Rachel Hibbard, whose separate Spacework exhibits can be found across from the Pantages Theater at South 9th and Broadway, emphasize different aspects of urban space as a stage – a space to simultaneously recreate and distort the viewers understanding of a city’s interconnectivity and disparity.
Cooning’s The Golden Hour presents us with large, detailed and delicate white paper cutouts that, within their organic, sweeping forms, create a sense of refuge from the aggressive urban setting. The lacy layering contrasts with the surrounding rough pavement and brick, creating a tangible fragility.
Cooning’s layers of wings, leaves, and carefully constructed honey combs draw the viewer in with their intricate detail, and the repetition and patterning found within is far from tedious, as the organic shapes create a whimsical respite from the urban setting. Set in the coarseness of a drab empty building, Cooning’s artwork reflects on the relationship between form and structure and the vulnerability of nature in the city.
Rachel Hibbard works with paper cutouts in an entirely different manner, while also contemplating the relationship between nature (in this case, human) and edifice. Her installation, Meyouus&Them, is a crowd of small figures that at first glance appear to be simple magazine cutouts, but at a closer look are specific icons representing different ethnicities and cultures. Hubbard imbues the installation with the impulse of societies to create subdivisions and categories, presenting her viewer with a critical perspective on human nature.
The paper figures, placed almost chess-like on the storefront’s existing black and white linoleum, extend past the light of a single bulb into the darkness of the space’s dirt and concrete, creating an ominous and reflective effect. There seems to be strategy in the crowd’s ranks, but where they have come from and where they are headed are both unknowable. The darkness of the space adds intrigue to the rows of planets strung above, emphasizing the spatial and celestial relationship of humanity’s cultural development. Hibbard’s installation raises questions about community and shared experience, creating an awareness of the city as an environmental and societal element.
Both Cooning and Hibbard work with paper to materialize the urban experience; their works display themes of interconnectedness, and explore the discourse between societies, their environment and time through their manipulation of paper. The two installations’ neighboring proximity and their dissimilar yet equally compelling handling of the medium allows for additional reflection on the way Spaceworks subtly curates, bringing together artists that interact with each other as well as with existing urban surroundings to create an intriguing aesthetic that is downtown Tacoma.
Review by Jill Sanford
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Tacoma Arts In Review, a new column on Exit 133, regularly shares timely reviews and stories on art happenings in Tacoma written by local college students and community members. For more information and application details, go here.