PAPER POWER

FROSCH&CO is pleased to present Paper Power, featuring artists Yvette Cohen, Elise Engler, Leslie Kerby, Eva Lake, Magnolia Laurie, Vicki Sher, and Jeanne Verdoux. 

Paper is small. Delicate. Fleeting. It is our notepads full of miscellany and marginalia. The to-do lists we hang on the fridge. Yet paper is also the letters we preserve, the journals we pass down, and the books we cherish. It is the substrate on which much of our memories survive, revealed to us in pen strokes, creases, and smudge marks. Featuring large drawings by all women artists, Paper Power engages paper as an archive of women’s embodied experiences and their claim to space. 

Vicki Sher captures her response to being in nature through an emotional, tactile lens. Her textured compositions are built from layers of painting and collage, combining geometric systems with organic structures. Also inspired by the natural world, Magnolia Laurie creates imaginary, cross-sectional landscapes that complicate our expectation of a human perspective. Her ink drawings suggest a geologic span of time—visual layers repeatedly build up and break down, simultaneously evidencing immediate and gradual change. Meanwhile, Yvette Cohen’s drawings stretch our perception of space beyond the frame. By activating the white walls of the gallery as part of her works, the movement in her bold, fluid shapes extends to the body of the viewer as they interact with her Another Day, Another Shape series.

Jeanne Verdoux’s drawings explore the female figure as a vessel for interior life experiences. She builds her drawings in tandem with ceramics, emphasizing the physical energy she embeds in her forms through her making process as well as the dimensionality and materiality of the medium itself. Also focusing on the female form is Eva Lake, whose collages recontextualize modern beauties within ancient tableaus. By reimagining models from vintage magazines in antique settings, she juxtaposes the ephemerality and youth of her figures with a vision of womanhood that is both timeless and monumental.

Elise Engler investigates more recent historical subject matter in her drawings documenting the evolution of the American political zeitgeist throughout her life. Each period is told from both her own perspective and from the dominant discourses of the time, collapsing countless individual narratives into a snapshot of the collective culture. In a similar vein, Leslie Kerby’s drawings critically examine the American healthcare system, capturing the societal and political problematics of the industry in intimate, charged moments between doctors and patients. Her figures encounter one another in liminal spaces teeming with fungi and flora, implying both decay and the potential for healing and regrowth.  

Be they material or immaterial, Paper Power encourages us to look to our own archives as sources of empowerment.