ART REVIEW
“3x3: Post-Its for the People”
Through Aug. 11. Noon-5 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Paper Plane Gallery, 3731 Main St., #2, College Park. 404-669-6594, paperplaneatl.com.
Bottom line: A new indie gallery’s focus on Post-it note art features an array of clever, ultra-affordable art.
A tiny 600-square-foot space with a big ambition — to bring affordable art to College Park — Paper Plane Gallery is the brainchild of artist Jack Michael, 28, a Sewanee grad, former New Yorker, and now College Park resident who has become the unofficial champion of the artistic potential of Michael's newly adopted hometown.
Tucked away on a side street on a block going through a mini-gentrification, the building that houses Paper Plane is now home to a hipster coffee shop, a taxidermy-festooned speakeasy and a mural by the street artist Yoyo Ferro.
Paper Plane’s second show since opening its doors this June is “3x3: Post-Its for the People.” This juried show encapsulates the spirit of a newborn gallery whose vibe suggests now-shuttered indie spaces like Beep Beep Gallery and Youngblood, both of which focused on a feisty, sleeves-rolled-up energy, emerging artists and wallet-friendly work.
Created to spotlight aggressively affordable art (all pieces are just $20), “3x3” features a selection of hyperlocal College Park and national artists who have sketched, collaged, painted and printed on the workaday doodle pad and memory jog of standard Post-it notes. What is so often a to-do list and goad to work becomes in “3x3” a fugue, a meditation and a vehicle for experimentation.
Featuring just 26 pieces, “3x3” was juried by Michael, College Park-based artist Whitney Stansell and artist and SCAD printmaking chair Robert Brown, and is that rarest of things: a tightly edited group show. Though this is a young gallery with some definite kinks to work out, Paper Plane does seem to be guided by an interest in showing off work to its best advantage more than giving everyone who submits work a shot.
As might be expected, there are certainly less compelling, superficial works in this group show, though for the most part, the artists in “3x3” use their small format in creative and novel ways.
Some of the standouts are several demi-portraits including a gilded-with-melancholy black-and-white work in ink and graphite by Jamison Harper, whose delicate sketch of the features of a young woman is enlivened by a silver halo and Keith Haring-style rays that surround and spring from her body as if to suggest a special animating energy.
Artist Karl Gustav Kroeppler’s pharmaceutical still life graphite drawings of pills like gabapentin and hydroxyzine pamoate, spelled out in script above, are treated like significant architecture against the artist’s barren landscapes and hint at the outsize significance of such substances in individual lives. Eugene Byrd’s striking, colorful works in acrylic paint and silkscreen reference the civil rights-era “I Am a Man” signs, and fill the limited 3x3 Post-it margins with some subtle commentary on race.
In an inventive work about how meaning is made, Christopher Stevens creates a triptych fugue on the progress of a paper crane. In his three-part deconstruction of that origami bird, Stevens represents the bird in one sketch as a diagram/blueprint for building the creature; on another Post-it as a pencil sketch; and in the final work, a three-dimensional sculpture, with the former representations of a paper crane now morphed into the thing itself.
At $20 each, these office space miniatures won’t last long, but hopefully the spirit of upstart scrappiness at Paper Plane Gallery will.
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