Between Spaces, cut paper, tape and mixed media, 2008

You’ve got but two days to check out Sarah Steinwachs’ “Square Roots” over at St. Joseph’s University Gallery, an intricately dense cut-paper exhibit that reminds us that Target and Chipotle aren’t the only reasons to go to City Avenue. “Square Roots” is a series of manipulated grids that focus on themes of three-dimensionality, in-between spaces and the joys of imperfection. The Tyler/Yale grad was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about patterns, the rough-and-tumble nature of her work, and the art of patience.

(”Square Roots,” through Oct. 30, St. Joe’s University Gallery at Boland Hall, 5600 City Ave., 610-660-1840, sju.edu/resources/gallery.)

City Paper: What’s the creating process like for you? Walk us through how you get from single sheet of paper to finished product.
Sarah Steinwachs: First I have to come up with a pattern. Depending on the paper this is done either free-hand or by using a guide, like a printed grid. I use various kinds of paper-grids, arches, magazines, envelopes, wax, mylar, etc. … Sometimes the pattern is inspired by surroundings — generally various grids that I see in the city — though the later ones start to become more organic. The tricky thing is trying to figure out if a pattern is poetic, or profound, or visually unique, or if it is clichĂ©d, cutesy, etc.  Sometimes I won’t know this until I have finished cutting the pattern out. … This part of the process is the labor intensive — mark after mark, a kind of meditative journey.
The other part of the process is superimposing the patterns on one another.  This is akin to painting for me. It is direct, and fast, and very active.  I get very excited watching how the colors and shapes interact spatially with one another. I have many patterns, so I can really be very engaged in “playing” to see how space compresses, or  gets emphasized. During this stage I will also paint on top of the patterns, or run them under water, or other stresses that may alter the form, color, shape of the patterns.

CP: In your artist statement you say you were unfamiliar with the tools you were using, so the imperfections were more interesting than trying to be exact.
SS: There is something thrilling about “ruining” something that I have taken so much time and care making. Each piece is different, and sometimes they want to fall apart and become more  organic, or look like they have been effected by time, and other ones want to be rigid. I let the piece dictate what happens.
Since I began, my ability with the knife has gotten a lot better, so in order to have the irregularities take place in the process, I either have to  make more intricate patterns, or push the amount of space to actual paper so that it will get weak and break on its own. I really don’t force the “organic quality,” because it will look trite and made-up.

CP: How long  did it take to make these pieces?
SS: It is hard to say how long, because I don’t work on one piece at a time. Generally each pattern takes 15-60 hours, and I will have several patterns — four or five — superimposed on one another. I spent this summer — June through September — working on six 12-by-12-by-4-inch pieces.

CP: Is your background in hand-cut paper, or painting, or another medium?
SS: My background is in painting, but in grad school I started drawing, and making paper constructions of brick walls. Since grad school, primarily drawing, gouache painting. Two  years ago I started working with cut paper. The impulse to cut paper was directly related to highly detailed city scape drawings of bricks, and weeds, and crumbling sidewalks — PHILLY — that I was making. I was pressing really hard into the paper-indentations, incisions, etc. I liked the physicality of what was happening, so I thought I would cut out the bricks to see what happened.  There was something intriguing about the fact that what was illusion became actual just by cutting holes into the paper — it went from illusion to object. This contradiction is still what I am playing with. From certain viewpoints the piece will look two-dimensional, and others like a  relief.

CP: I love the juxtaposition of rough-and-tumble and delicate in your pieces. They’re very structural, yet could crumble at any moment. What do you hope audiences get out of your work?
SS: “Wabi-sabi” is a term used in Japanese design — celebration of imperfection. … So often times in Japanese design you will see decay as part of the piece — the tea bowls that were irregular, with “ugly” glazings — as a reminder of true beauty and humility, or in a tea house you might see a crafted beam with a log found in nature side by side in the structure.
I look at Philly in much the same way — the evolution of time that plays out on objects, neighborhoods, etc., and how profound this visual residue is, because it says so much about the beauty and ugliness of everything all at once. The problem with this is that it is overplayed and can become saccharine, so the struggle in the work is getting it to have some of these implications without being so obvious or trite, and be inventive with it.

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