Folds

In the early months of the COVID-19 stay-at-home order, Suzanne Silver and I began a collaborative mail exchange. We made works for each other, then replied to ones received. From this looping call and response, a collection of small works accumulated, embodying our experiences of loss, sorrow, vulnerability, and rage: a living record of our response to the pandemic and the epidemic of anti-black racism and police violence.

In November 2020, we organized this exchange into an exhibition, Return to Sender, for the Columbus Printed Arts Center. The Center is in a former factory that manufactured fire engines at the turn of the century. Working together, we wore masks in this yawning space but mostly we worked alone. Over the course of three months, we took turns making and installing new works, continuing to build from our collaboration’s central concerns. Language of the wound was central to the exhibition: prick, puncture, gash, slash. These words became figures of speech signaling blind spots, erasures, and trap doors—a semaphore of vulnerability and resistance.

Folds emerged from these experiences. We wanted to bring more voices into the fold, as it were. We extended an invitation to twenty-eight artists and writers to participate in the exhibition with this prompt:

Unfolding is key to our curatorial premise: each participant will create a work and send it to the next as an inspiration for theirs, setting into motion a collaborative constellation. All works must be sent through the mail, either in a standard size envelope or a form no larger than 9 x 12”. With inspiration from Emily Dickinson’s envelope poems and Harry Smith’s paper airplanes, each artist will be prompted to activate the fold as form and concept and consider the mailed object’s potential to expand and collapse, travel and collect. By embracing the conditions of scale and risk inherent in shipping, the works will explore the aesthetics and ethics of contingency and serendipity and repair.

Folds returns to the intimate act of mail correspondence while bringing together a wider community of collaborators. Each artist had a week to respond to their received work before sending theirs to the next participant. With the demand for a quick response, we hoped to create the conditions for intuitive leaps. We were interested in the productive pressure of constraint and how to tap the meaning of fold as an experience of congregation. The project launched from Siena, Italy with Silver’s Illuminated Newspaper in June 2023 and concluded in Columbus, OH with Larson’s Assembly in August 2024, traveling throughout the U.S. in between.

Participating artists include Erica Baum, Sophia Chai, Moyra Davey, Amber Elison, Christine Heindl, Sara Hess, Christine Hume, Rhea Karam, Justine Kurland, Dionne Lee, Laura Larson, Laura Lisbon, Mary Lum, Aspen Mays (Her Windowsill Daydreaming (Richmond, CA) (2023) featured on splash page), Klea McKenna, Christian Patterson, Camille Paulhan, Jenny Perlin, Dani & Sheilah ReStack, Julia Schwartz, Lizzie Scott, Suzanne Silver, Lydia Smith, Christopher Stackhouse, Luke Stettner, Jo-ey Tang, Catherine Taylor, Carmen Winant, and Vanessa Woods.

On view at Project: ARTspace (NYC), September 25-November 13, 2024 and Mariani Gallery, University of Northern Colorado (Greeley, CO) , January 21-February 27, 2025.

Catalog available for sale here.