Striking attributes of paper's expressiveness certainly include scale and texture, elements several artists handled quite fluently. Joan Hall's Navigating Blue I spans nearly twelve feet across and stretches upward nearly ten, flooding the north wall of the outer gallery with an ocean of blue. Elena del Rivero's [Swi:t] Home (Five Dishcloths) cascades almost from the ceiling to the floor on a side wall of the inner gallery, an oversized reminder of how mundane objects witness the grist of our daily life, and the ever-presence of cellulose fiber, even in our kitchen cupboards. Three-dimensionality and the contrast of light and shadow generate intrigue in the work of Winifred Lutz and Roxana Perez-Mendez. Lutz's Wound and Shadow lingers on a side wall, inviting the viewer to peer around and beneath its undulating surface. Perez-Mendez's Hammock swings silently in space, a diffused white, evoking the soothing rhythm of a gentle wind and the glare of the sun. In a piece entitled Do Unto Others, Eric Avery has assembled four large sheets of molded white paper and printed them with a stark black linoblock. The extreme embossing of the relief matrix underscores the intensity of the image that only slowly comes into focus: four bombs hurtling toward a huddled figure in the upper left, a plane zeroing in on the World Trade Center at the bottom right. The viewer is stirred viscerally to touch the surface. Awareness of our common humanity, as well as man's inhumanity to man, finds even more physical expression in the pulp used by John Risseeuw for his three letterpress-printed broadsides. Bella, Bella, Strange Fruit, and Map 'N Facts are created on paper made from the clothing of Cambodian land mine victims injured by Chinese Type 72 antipersonnel mines, as well as bamboo fibers from Cambodian minefields and the currency of nations whose mines and ordnance are found there. Risseeuw's colophon poignantly expresses "gratitude and respect for victims of war detritus everywhere" and pleads for a "cessation of production and use of these indiscriminate weapons." The historical tradition of the broadside as a vehicle for public announcement is an appropriate format for Risseeuw's work. The shaped sheet and recognizable imagery (of a pizza) provide an inviting, accessible means for conveying a powerful social theme. Mel Edwards, Jim Hodges, and Chuck Close contribute pieces that investigate the partnership between image-making and a medium's potential. Edwards merges sculpture and graphics, using a water-rinse spray over three-dimensional objects like chains, to amplify the vigor of his frequent African wartime iconography. Hodges couches overlapped colored sheets together, creating vibrant graphic compositions that are pressed so flat the colored pulp becomes physical material and continuous space simultaneously. Chuck Close expands the genre of portraiture, building up a likeness (in this case, of himself), much as the Impressionists did with paint, but here with stenciled, pigmented linen pulp in a limited black /gray/white tonal range. On a distinctly personal level, Paul Wong examines both his own cultural identity as a second-generation Chinese American and paper's cultural origin in China, through his extensive knowledge and skill as a Western-trained hand papermaker and visual artist. Wong has created several intriguing pieces. He integrates partially burned Chinese joss paper created for religious rituals into the paper matrix and then transfers Chinese visual references with solvents, achieving an effect not unlike ink rubbings of sacred steles and bronze vessels. Cave Grottoes is a two-panel piece; the front, free-floating sheet is pockmarked with random apertures, affording a glimpse of the warm red sheet poised behind, Buddhas silently entombed in their grotto-like shapes. In Wong's Gate, a winged paper awning hangs suspended from the inner gallery ceiling, hovering overhead, its spine paralleling the center of the space. The translucency of the abaca, intensified by the track lighting, lifts one's eyes heavenward, yet the black and white Xerox transfers spotting the surface suggest the textural qualities of stone and antiquity, a rooted earthiness. Lightness and buoyancy prevail and one truly does encounter the sense of a spirit on its ascent, like a kite in flight, through a gate to the beyond. Another kind of beyond is explored in Hall's Navigating Blue I. Replete with kozo, gampi, pulp painting with abaca, printing with litho and digital collagraph, and acrylic coating, this work inundates the viewer with a sense of charting unfamiliar depths. Perspective blurs: one could be looking up into a cosmic universe, steering by stars, peering deep into the swirling eddies of the briny deep, or gazing down from overhead on the topography of continents, oceans of clouds slipping past, obscuring land forms and water bodies. The entire piece is suspended from the top, allowing the four individual sheets to breathe, but the exact overlapping and minimal transparency negates the possibility of seeing the color, texture, and mark making on the under layers. I wanted to slip behind and page through each sheet, throwing them open with a voluminous, grand gesture, like a huge sail on the open water. Most dramatic are the Young Pines towering in the far recess of the quiet inner gallery space. Virginia Tyler has cast handmade overbeaten flax in irregularly shaped sheets over three young pine trees, creating an overlapping pattern inspired by the pine bark itself. These hollow cylinders float a few inches above the floor, stretching majestically to the ceiling. Concentrated lighting infuses their interiors with a radiant glow. The illuminated pine bark patterning yields different degrees of transparency, texturing a surface at once reminiscent of the actual bark but also suggesting the pore-like cellular structure of cellulose seen under a microscope. The halos cast on the floor beneath each trunk hint at the sanctity of this valuable earthly resource and a reverence for nature. Certainly, the sensation of truly confronting a hallowed space, like Thoreau on Walden Pond, overtakes the viewer. We are at once in awe of the grandeur of nature and united in spirit with these inhabitants of earth.  Kudos to gallery director Greg Weiss, for envisioning and mounting such an ambitious installation. His skill and inventiveness in spatially presenting such a spectrum of pieces, and strategically orchestrating the variables of light, height, viewer pacing, and relational proximity contribute to rallying the voices of these contemporary American paper artists into a resonant and articulate exhibition. Cathie Ruggie Saunders