Folds, Surface, Space: Sculptural Origami Lab

Part tour, part sculpture lab, this workshop leads young adults through the galleries to work on origami exercises addressing some of the same formal concerns that the minimalists in Dia’s collection mulled over. Participants will learn to fold paper into curving hyperbolic paraboloids, meanwhile looking at the bended and self-supporting structures of Richard Serra. They will construct multicolored Jackson cubes out of sheets of paper, which (like Imi Knoebel’s modular paintings) might vary infinitely in color but never change in structure. While sitting nearby the crumpled sculpture by John Chamberlain, participants will make their own crushed compositions, investigating the graphic crease patterns that can result when paper is painted and unfolded. In the Learning Lab, the session will conclude with “one-cut” experiments to create surprising shapes, as well as free lab time where techniques learned earlier can be incorporated into artworks unique to each participant. A brief presentation on what people in the past (from Japanese masters to western artists like Josef Albers) and up to present (MIT’s Erik Demaine, Robert J. Lang) have done with origami will also be given.

Emily Weiner (www.emilyweiner.net) is a painter and writer based in New York City. She has a BA from Barnard College and an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, and has exhibited her work in New York City, Los Angeles, and internationally in France. She is faculty in the Visual and Critical Studies BFA department at the School of Visual Arts and has been a guest instructor of studio courses at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published art reviews for Time Out New York, artforum.com, ARTnews, Heeb Magazine, the Santiago Times, the Columbia University art journal MUSEO, and the Visual Arts Journal, among other publications.