Folds, Rips, Weaves, Soaked in Ink

From crumpled receipts and printer copies to letters left in mailboxes, paper is a material in a perpetual state of alchemy, becoming vessels for individual and collective communication, maps of memory, transmutable records of histories. For her fifth show at Luhring Augustine, veteran printmaker and sculptor Zarina brings these very material and metaphysical qualities of paper’s receptive surfaces to the forefront of her creative practice.

At a distance, her mostly white, ephemeral collages are nearly indiscernible from the walls, save for handmade Indian paper shapes soaked in black Sumi ink and woodcut prints of Arabic script punctuating each framed work. Her small collage works are meant to be seen up-close, demanding an intimate examination of their imprecise harmony: the delicate slopes at the woven seams of Untitled, 2013, the gently askew circle of Untitled, 2017, or the mountainous, fabric-like creasing of Starting Over, 2016. Through the simple gestures of cutting and crushing, Zarina demonstrates that, despite our presumption of emptiness, these two-dimensional pages can come alive with sculptural plasticity. As John Cage remarked upon seeing Robert Rauschenberg’s 1951 White Paintings, Zarina’s collages are “airports for lights, shadows, and particles,” recording the results of actions rather than reproducing naturalistic images.