“This Week in Dieu Donné: POWER PLAY Now on Display”

Dieu Donné is excited to present Power Play, an exhibition featuring works in handmade paper by Dieu Donné’s 2022 Workspace Residents: Patricia Ayres, David Baskin, Aisha Tandiwe Bell, and Anastasiya Tarasenko. With the help of Dieu Donné’s master collaborators, the residents were able to use hand papermaking to upend social norms and reinvent the meaning of the craft itself. Over the course of their residencies, each artist explored how traditional gender, racial, or economic structures of power, control, and influence could be confronted and opposed with little more than some pulp and pigments. Using pulp painting, casting, mold making, embedding, and blowouts, among other techniques, the included artists found diverse ways to utilize the transformative power of paper in constructing new critical frameworks.

Patricia Ayres is a New York-born artist whose work explores themes of isolation, separation, confinement, and conformity. She typically works in sculpture and mixed media, using clothing, latex, fabric, and padding to create works that evoke the sensation of being wrapped in otherworldly garments. In her residency, she examined the structures and iconographies of Catholicism, shaping sheets of pulp into semi-recognizable religious forms and embedding materials from Catholic ceremony – breaking down modes of religious authority and control. 

David Baskin is a sculptor, installation, and visual artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His work often reflects on the intersection between capitalistic materialism and artistic aesthetic using common, everyday objects to craft sprawling sculptures and intricate installations. He pulled from the language of consumerism, re-casting and re-forming purchased decorative objects to elevate his materials and transform mass-market, machine-made design into hand-made, conceptually rigorous fine art.

Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an artist best known for her ability to create myth and ritual from mixed-media art and installations that utilize performance, video, sound, and music to create a magical experience. At Dieu Donné, she translated her painting and ceramic practices into hand papermaking, building multi-colored, layered, and textured faces, forms, and patterns to reveal the constantly shifting masks one wears when navigating hostile environments, people, or stereotypes of race, sex, and class. 

Anastasiya Tarasenko focuses on using art as a method of social critique through quirky, vibrant scenes that evoke fairy tales and playful illustrations. She took a painterly approach to the possibilities of pulp painting, creating layered scenes of fantastical figures inspired by folk tales, fantasy, and history to comment on gender roles, politics, and contemporary culture.

While the opening reception may have already passed, it’s not too late to see the fruits of these artists’ labor for yourself! The works will be open through the rest of the summer, closing at the end of August in preparation of Dieu Donné next exciting showcase. You can request to view the gallery anytime between 10am - 4pm, Monday through Friday. Please fill out the form below in order to schedule your visit today!