These exhibitions of paper works came on the cusp of warm weather and prior to the hyper-driven art events this spring in New York including the Armory, Scope, Art Rock, and Diva art fairs. Art blur is an inevitable side effect for viewers of these Manhattan-based artworld spectacles. In spite of it all, the overwhelming diversity of styles and media of such promotional events only make the viewing pleasure of a carefully-crafted handmade paper art object sweeter and more exalted, particularly if the gallery conditions lend themselves to an experience of quietude, if not outright contemplation. High-quality presentation along with devotion, intensity, and intellectual clarity were the collective hallmarks of the exhibitions reviewed here.   Linda Cross's ambitious reliefs at John Davis Gallery are ingeniously made of recycled paper. The artist uses smooth all-purpose paper as well as soaked cotton linters mixed with acrylic gel to produce a papier-maché-like mash that she models over Styrofoam forms. The artist's wall works are not only provocative brain and eye teasers, they are magically seductive in their coloration and overall configurations. Cross poses intertwining questions about Nature with her purposeful conflations of what appears to be interconnected strata referencing human debris, rocks, and riverbeds. The nature of the real and the artificial, the relationship of the real to the symbolic, and the constancy of the flow of time (man's and earth's) are ideas that fiercely circulate in each artwork.   "Systems" is the umbrella title of the Abby Leigh exhibition at Betty Cuningham, consisting of works on canvas (whose ostensible subject is the inside formations of the oyster), a floor piece entitled Water Map made of etched zinc plates, and two suites of paper works collectively termed My Personal Atlas. Leigh produced the paper works in 2004 at Dieu Donné Papermill (where a concurrent exhibition was on view) in various formats including long, narrow, rectangular tableaus (generally 60 x 30 inches); more conventional 14 x 10-1/4 inch studies, and large-scale 80-inch diameter tondos. Comprised of watermarked translucent abaca with inclusions on top of a cotton base sheet and often incorporating ink and colored pencil, Leigh's efforts on paper set a new high standard for delicacy and rigor. Her paper works bring to mind cartographic realities colonized by floating images culled from old medical and science reference books. We see body organs, orifices, metabolic processes, images pertaining to botany, the natural and the hermetic sciences—all of which invoke the visualization and inscription of our knowledge base from Post-Renaissance to Post-Modernism. \[An exhibition catalogue is available by contacting Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York. Ed.\]   Leonardo Drew's first exhibition at Brent Sikkema showcases the artist's sensitivity to material texture, color, and weight. Repetition, reiteration, and structured formatting allow the artist to bring the shop-worn aspects of rural life in the South into the urban visual conversation. Time itself and its creases seem to unfold before us in unforgettable ways in Number 92 and Number 94. Whether Drew's paper casts float down from the wall as a gentle cloud of frayed memories (as in Number 94) or whether they are encased in a stacked set of reliquary-like boxes (as in Number 92), his fusion of visceral strength and guttural vulnerability creates moving scenarios. The pronounced elegance of these memento-mori works ratchet up the palpable psychic dimension of such environments. The ghostly, fragmented doppelganger-forms of toys, telephones, small tools, and kitchen appliances—now merely the husks of the once-lived—invoke a charged feeling of contemplative sadness that lingers in the mind long after the viewer leaves the gallery.    "Pucker" is the title of an exhibition at Dieu Donné Papermill of new paper works by Jessica Stockholder. Produced in Dieu Donné's Lab Grant residency program, the three editioned pieces and five unique works on view, all in Stockholder's signature vibrant palette, hint at the range of her experimentation in the papermill. \[An accompanying Lab Grant publication is available by contacting Dieu Donné Papermill, New York. Ed.\] Many of the works reveal the imprinting of textures left by pressing objects into the pigmented abaca and cotton paper. Some have photographs, fabrics, and found material imbedded directly into, onto, and between layers of different types of pulps. The papers' buckling, puckering, and cockling easily suggest the expressive elasticity and tactility which permeate all of Stockholder's individual artworks as well as her sculptural mis-en-scènes. The works in "Pucker" are playful, concentrated fields of optical intensities, each containing witty visual digressions, double-entendres, double-takes, pratfalls, and playful non-sequiturs. With their unanticipated juxtapositions, deft use of pictorial spaces and voids, and synthetic amalgamations of bright colors, textures, and images. Stockholder's efforts take the viewer on aesthetic joyrides that easily brighten-up the gray snow-days of the ebbing Manhattan winter.