ARTnews, 2014
Essay by Jo Anna Isaak
"The Bellagio Suite"
The Landscape Explored:
Interview by William Forrestall
Telegraph-Journal, 2013
The Aquinian, 2013
NY Arts Magazine, 2007
NY Arts Magazine, 2004
NY Arts Magazine, 2001
Artnet.com, 2001
Review Magazine, 1999
Cover Magazine, 1999
Essay by Jonathan Goodman
"Inklings"
Manhattan Times,
2005
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Review by Carl E. Hazlewood, NY Arts Magazine,
2001
I go out of the darkness
onto a road of darkness
lit only by the far off moon
on the edge of the mountains.
Izumi Shikibu (a Japanese woman of the Heian Court)
In reproduction Sky Pape's work on paper looks like brushed steelsilvery,
with barely gestural strokes that track the movements of the hand
in almost meditative arcing sweeps around and within the contours
of an implied tondo. In actuality the images are revealed to be
made of something rather less intractable. Instead of the impermeable
resistance of metal, these are actually drawings on board. But they
don't yield the lightness of touch one expects from an average sketch,
and they are not preparatoryrather, they are conceived as
independent projects. Marks are made with a hard graphite pencil
that is firmly impressed into the ground. Lines bunch tightly together
and totally cover the surface in parallel directional configurations
which yield a variety of abstract images. These works result from
careful deliberationin practical terms as well as in a metaphysical
sense. Pared-down and refined to a glistening mineral luster, Pape's
tondo shapes have learned something from minimalism, while shedding
that movement's overbearing machismo for something more inflected,
an interiority closer to the reductiveness of poetry. It becomes
a visual haiku where one seeks to rescue a fleeting expressive image
revealed from within a dimension of pervading darkness. "And from
the/ceiling/darkness bends/a heavy flame." ("The Cold Room" by Yvor
Winters). Planes curve, shift and change as darkness pushes back
the light which falls glimmering off the resistant surfaces. And
for a moment the flat graphite circles become holes inviting entrance.
But it is only an illusion. Like her large, equally reticent, but
quietly expressive work using tightly packed leaves of kozo paper
briefly touched at the edges by sumi ink, the new graphite "Silver
Lining" drawings refer to Eastern aesthetics for its inspiration.
The organic processes of nature and science are also sources of
inspiration (think of Leonardo's drawing studies showing the way
water moves in a storm). Sky Pape, is a native of Toronto, Canada,
who lives and works in New York City.
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