Cut Up/Cut Out just closed at Huntsville Museum of Art and will be opening at Pensacola Museum of Art on March 2nd.  Both Michael Buscemi and Karen Margolis have work in this traveling group show that originated at the Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek.  If you find yourself in Pensacola, definitely stop by to see it March 2 – June 17, 2018.

Cut Up/Cut Out is a contemporary view of an ancient art practice that has evolved over thousands of years. This exhibition, which includes national and international artists, honors both tradition and innovation with a selection of over one hundred artworks by 51 artists representing diverse techniques and approaches to making art.

The art of cutting paper dates back thousands of years, with early artworks coming from 6th Century China. The artists of Cut Up/Cut Out explore the many methods of decorative piercing and cutting, but extend their media to include paper, cloth, metal, wood, rubber and much more. The transformative nature of cutting into and through a surface provides endless possibilities for converting the material from opaque to transparent, from flat to sculptural, from rigid to delicate, and from ordinary to exquisite. The artist might retain the plane of the surface and incise it to create lace-like imagery, or use thousands of intricately cut pieces to build a sculptural object or atmosphere. The process and precision required for this method of art-making is laborious, technically demanding, and always astonishing.