THE WORLD WASHI SUMMIT
At 35 galleries around Toronto
and elsewhere.
Given the way artists describe the properties of washi - Japanese handmade paper - you'd think it was a brand new, space-age material.
For Nancy Jacobi, who founded The Japanese Paper Place in Toronto in 1982 and organized the current World Washi Summit, an epic exhibition of washi-works by 125 artists in 35 galleries from Toronto, Oakville, Hamilton, London, Sarnia, Port Hope and Montreal, washi is considerably more than that.
"Washi," writes Jacobi in the introduction to the handsome catalogue that accompanies the Summit, "is much more than a flat surface to be printed or drawn upon. Malleable, translucent, absorbent, soft yet incredibly strong, these sheets called washi combine the sensuality of textile with the practical elegance of the fine papers of old. For us to call them 'paper' at all is to miss their incredible potential in the hands of artists."
Jacobi's enthusiasm is amply supported by even the most cursory exploration of the washi works on exhibition at Summit galleries across the city. Artists have taken to washi as if they were born to it. Yael Brotman, whose exquisite, wall-mounted installation made up of sheets of etched washi is one of the highlights of Flex, the washi exhibition at Loop Gallery, says washi's properties "are magical. You can scrunch it up and then reclaim it ... it can be translucent, ethereal, or solidly present. It opens up so many directions for me."
For Cybele Young, who seems to have led washi as far from its origins as possible - she has somehow made (for the Edward Day Gallery) a tiny paper movie projector, amazingly detailed, which "projects" a wall full of minuscule washi pictures. Washi, she says, is "strong and sensitive, beautiful and subtle, challenging and patient, understanding and inspiring, honest and loyal - a soulmate you can crumple into a ball."
Everybody seems to want to crumple washi into a ball - just to watch it reassert itself, I suppose.
Artist Wing Wu has eschewed washi's delicacy by creating a mural-sized washi work (at Index G), a kind of "event horizon" which, according to Wing, preserves "the papermaker's creation." Unwilling to "impose an Art Work onto the paper," she says she has made hundreds of incense burn marks all over the paper's vast expanse, marks which she sees as "a form of shape-writing, describing the smooth buttery grain of the paper."
The entire Washi Summit is energized by a rather poignant paradox: Washi has been continuously made for 1,400 years, but it is clearly a sort of endangered species. In the late 1800s there were 80,000 papermaking families in Japan; now, according to Nancy Jacobi, there are fewer than 320.
And yet regardless of (or perhaps because of) washi's fragile existence as a medium, contemporary artists find it fits them like a glove. The best washi works in the Summit are not mere extensions and continuations of washi's conventional properties and abilities (delicacy, translucency) - they offer vivid new ways of using this most venerable of materials.
At Open Studio, for example, Lisa Levitt has made a wall full of paper bags. "The inspiration for this exhibit," she writes in her artist's statement, "is a little bag which held the purchase of nails from a hardware store." She took the bag apart, and using its dimensions as "a master template," she employed sheets of washi on which to print linocuts (on both the outside and the inside of the bags) to make new richly-hued, bag-like wall sculptures.
One of the boldest incarnations of what might be thought of as neo-washi works is a very witty and graphically forceful exhibition by Barbara Klunder called Deep Paper Cuts at the David Kaye Gallery. Klunder, who has always had a winning way with creatures, has generated a buoyant collection of winged, buzzy insects - a firefly, a wasp, a moth, a bee, a flying ant, a monarch butterfly and, most exotically, a Sugikama (cedar bark) Jazz Dragonfly, all intricately and ingeniously cut and assembled from sheets of washi. Each one is scarcely confined by its frame - Klunder often lets the creature's wings overrun the picture's edges, as if it is actually in the process of fleeing its ignominious life on a gallery wall.
One of the most continuously delightful Summit exhibitions is The Washi Challenge at the Edward Day Gallery. Here, in addition to the always astonishing work of the aforementioned Cybele Young (she of the washi movie projector), you will find Ed Pien's virtuoso Pine, a big, joyously mysterious work full of dark figures, an operatic riff on the traditional Chinese papercuts with which Pien must have been familiar as a child in Taiwan. It's a brilliant work.
Also quite breathtaking are Joyce McClelland's two tapestry-like washi pictures, Twist of Nature and Continue, in which the background of each picture - which looks like needlepoint - is in fact tightly woven washi, as is the "thread" that weaves an abstract, circuitous, enlivening track over each of the pictures' surfaces.
It's nice to see two washi collages by the venerable Leonard Brooks who, at age 99, was urged out of retirement by the "washi challenge." Washi is revivifying. And the refinement of Brooks' collages is charmingly offset by a floor-bound flock of washi pigeons ( Yarker Pigeon Club) by sculptor Shane Dark.
Among my favourite washi works of the entire Summit is Catherine Heard's startling, wall-mounted Arteries and Veins after Gerard Lairesse, Anatomia Humani Corporis, 1685. Heard has taken splendid advantage of washi's ductile possibilities, twisting it into filigrees and capillaries of dark, sanguine paper which, taken together, make up a map-like figure which, devoid of flesh and bones and organs, is a kind of diagrammatic washi-projection of the body's circulatory system. It's feathery-delicate and evanescent, ornate and flamboyant, intimate, internal, funny, ghastly and, in the end, ennobling.
The Wing Wu work is $4,000 at Index G, 50 Gladstone Ave., Toronto, until June 22. 416-535-6957.
Lisa Levitt's paper bags are $200 each and are at Open Studio, 401 Richmond St. W., Suite 104, Toronto, until June 21; 416-504-8238.
Barbara Klunder's Deep Paper Cuts are $2,700-$3,900 and are at the David Kaye Gallery, 1092 Queen St. W., Toronto, until June 29; 416-532-9075.
Cybele Young's washi movie projector (I Didn't See That Part) is $9,000, and is at the Edward Day Gallery, 952 Queen St. W., Toronto, until June 29. As is Ed Pien's Pine ($12,800), Joyce McClelland's washi-thread faux-tapestries ($2,800 each), Leonard Brooks' collages ($3,000 each), Shane Dark's washi pigeons ($300 each) and Catherine Heard's magnificent Arteries and Veins ($3,400); 416-921-6540.