By Michelle Broder Van Dyke
1. The Shape of Things
The Museum of Craft and Folk Art recently exhibited “The Shape of Things: Paper Traditions and Tranformations.” The show was a historical investigation of traditional cut, folded, and molded paper arts from Korea, Japan, China, and the Philippines, along with contemporary art inspired by them. Long-established Asian paper arts, such as Filipino parol lanterns, were juxtaposed with contemporary creations, such as Gene Apellido’s decorative stars, while little plaques outlined the date and cause of death for various traditional craft arts, noting such realities as mass production and forest extinction. Nonetheless, the emphasis was positive. The overall presentation revealed how classic papercuts, katagami, paper lanterns, papier-mache, and paper boxes inspired the adjacent contemporary art, which varied in degrees of intrigue and engagement.
Bull Moose, Opus 413, by Robert J. Lang
Banner for “The Shape of Things”
Spectacular life-like creepy crawlers such as a centipede, a black widow, and a Goliath beetle were placed alongside each other in glass cases that looked more like the taxidermy collection of a mad scientist than what they really were: displays of intricate crease patterns based on the mathematical theory of origami geometric constructions (i.e. Huzita axioms). Pitting conventional origami diagrams, which describe a figure by a folding sequence — a linear step-by-step pattern of progression — against crease patterns, which, by contrast, provide a one-step connection from the unfolded square to the folded form, is no competition. In the past ten years, crease pattern origami has become the popular style, allowing anyone to fold a real-looking 3-D moose.