
04.28.17
Excerpt: Exhibition
At a New Brooklyn Gallery, The Paperweight is Anything But Obsolete
If there’s anyone who knows from paperweights, it’s New York gallerists Patrick Parrish and Zoe Fisher. The two began working together when Fisher — who at the time was helming her own fledgling gallery — began assisting Parrish at his Tribeca space, which not only sells vintage examples of those sculptural objects but also boasts a well-documented obsession with Carl Aubock (perhaps king of all paperweight-makers). So it makes sense that when Fisher and Parrish finally decided to go into business together — turning Fisher’s Brooklyn-based 99¢ Plus gallery into a more polished, jointly-owned venture called Fisher Parrish — that they would choose the paperweight as their first canvas.
The inaugural exhibition opened earlier this month and features more than 100 artists and designers riffing on the traditional form. Each mini-canvas seems an appropriate avatar for the design practice from which it came: Cody Hoyt’s puzzle-like piece is made from three interlocking bars of sand and resin; Anton Alvarez presents a miniature version of his latest experiments in extruded ceramic; Jonathan Nesci’s is a perfectly milled, stepped steel disc. Other entrants include one made from hand-cast pewter, another from cast plastic with embedded onion bits, a third made from coffee granules encase in paraffin wax, and a meta-submission by Field that consists of a weighty book filled with images of other, assorted paperweights. The exhibition is on view until June 4 — check out some of our favorites below!
Above: Camilla Iliefski
Cody Hoyt
Brian Thoreen
Alex Reed
Brian Kraft
Thomas Barger
Anton Alvarez
B Thom Stevenson
Chen Chen and Kai Williams
Chris Beeston
David Brandon Geeting
Field Experiments
Greg Buntain
Ian Collings
Ian McDonald
Jesse Moretti
Joey Watson
Jonathan Nesci
Kaelie Barnard
Kylie White
Matthew Ronay
Maxim Schidlovsky
OOIEE
Pat Kim
Soft Baroque
Various Projects
Visibility
Christopher Kurtz
Mimi Jung