Slash and Moving Paper: exhibition and competition

New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) is running a competition that celebrates the use of cut paper in animation inspired by its current exhibition Slash: Paper under the Knife. Upload your own videos to the website, view existing clips, and vote on your favourites.

Slash: Paper Under the Knife explores the use of cut paper in contemporary art and design, through sculpture, installation, and video animation. The exhibition features 12 new site-specific installations and other new and recent work by over 50 contemporary artists from around the world.

Using books as raw material, some artists have created works from printed books, subverting their original meaning, such as Scottish artist Georgia Russell, who presents a shredded version of Gombrich’s famous The Story of Art inside a glass dome, creating a fringed effect – like a porcupine specimen in a museum.

All Moving Paper submissions will be judged by MAD’s online visitors for the People’s Choice winners and by a jury of artists and curators for the MAD’s choice winners. Winning films will be screened as a part of the Moving Paper Film Festival on March 27 and March 28, 2010 at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City.

German artist Andreas Kocks has installed a site-specific work, a massive explosion of black paper that captures the dynamism of wet paint thrown violently against a wall.

Other artists use paper to express political viewpoints, such as American artist Ariana Boussard-Reifel, who takes apart the text of a white supremacist book – cutting out each individual word, reducing the book into a pile of meaningless letters.

Cut paper is also used by some artists to create imagery landscapes, such as UK artist Chris Kenny, who has created a fictional Grand Island from deconstructed maps and French-born artist Béatrice Coron, who presents Watercity, a piece she created on-site during a three-week residence in MAD’s Open Studios last June.

Andrew Scott Ross’ series Rocks and Rocks and Caves and Dreams is a mythical pre-history landscape that examines our cultural beliefs.

Museum of Arts and Design (MAD)
Moving Paper

Image credits left to right, top to bottom: 1 Courtesy of England & Co. Photo: England & Co Gallery, London; 3 Christoph Knoch; 4 Collection of the artist photo: Ariana Boussard-Reifel; 5 Courtesy of England & Co. photo: England & Co Gallery, London; 6 Collection of the artist. photo: Antoine Tempé; 7 Collection of the artist. photo: Vanessa Mayoraz