BURNAWAY » The Paper Twins Move Eloquently from the Streets to the Gallery

The Paper Twins Move Eloquently from the Streets to the Gallery

Written By Laura Chance on June 6, 2011 in Reviews

Paper Twins, Edgar A. English, Pet them Gently; Kill them Quickly, 2010, grass, wood, paint, and stones. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Gone With the Twins at Get This! Gallery is a two-woman, collaborative, creative project. Communicating through visual call and response, the Paper Twins examine cultural identity, narrative, and memory to create ties between Southern and Latin American culture. “¡The south!” they exclaim in their exhibition statement, “Oh man oh man; they both came from the south… two different souths, in two different hemispheres, but so similar indeed,” and through compiling their own individual histories, Edgar and Nica find similarities in how human beings—Southern and Latino alike—evoke the past.

Neat little boxes of grass are displayed below drawings, and sand and stone meticulously fan out across the Get This! Gallery floors. As I walk around the gallery, I can’t help but think to myself, “What are these two rogue street artists doing methodically displaying artwork on whitewashed walls?” It’s all so tidy and clean! I like it. There are no underwear trees and playful female figures hop scotching in their panties, hallmarks of the Paper Twins street works. Gone With the Twins is introspective and pensive, though the Twins haven’t lost all traces of their mischievous nature. Sang-ga, one of Edgar’s works, is a wooden cutout and freeze frame of two young girls singing along to a recording of the Carter family. Modeled after two of Edgar’s ancestors, the cutout stands in a patch of grass so that you’re seeing these songstresses in a moment of recollection. At their feet you’ll find a pair of Edgar’s grandmother’s dentures, which brings a tangible family relic into the layers of meaning behind the work. These dentures are a physical metempsychosis, channeling Edgar’s family history and acting as a medium for one woman and her story, like a ouija board communicating with ghosts from the past or an old house harboring the spirits of a family that once inhabited its walls. Beyond that, the image of city streets resonates in the dentures’ seemingly discarded presence, like jettison we disassociate ourselves with once it hits the curb.

Paper Twins, Nica, La Mujer del Mercado, 2011, grains, wood, tops, chopped potato, quinoa, yarn. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

One of Nica’s larger works, La Mujer del Mercado, responds to the physical representation of memory seen is Edgar’s Sang-gal. La Mujer is a Peruvian woman decked out in bright traditional garb. She thumbs through an entangled mess of vividly pink yarn, which hangs from three brightly colored tops displayed above in a diamond-shaped frame. Nica plays with the viewer’s perspective through three dimensions, framing La Mujer in a bed of sand and rocks evocative of the Peruvian desert—a display that acts in response to Edgar’s use of grass representing the lush landscape of the rural South. Within the diamond frame, the tops transform into kite-like presences as the pink yarn oscillates back and forth beneath the gallery’s fan. La Mujer del Mercado blends memories of the traditional Peruvian woman with recollections of a childhood pastime, and the three-dimensional objects illustrate equal importance between tactile sense and visual manifestations. In utilizing visual art as an investigation of our ability to recall past events, the Paper Twins recognize that the soft tugging of kite strings in a child’s grip or the spiky feeling of grass beneath the toes contributes to our recollection of the past. These layers make memory more lush and vivid.

Though the artists find similarities in their execution of representing memory, they’re conducting two separate experiments with the same tools. Edgar’s muted, sepia-toned works illustrate the multi-faceted layers of memory. In the lengthily titled Oscar Jefferson found a rattlesnake and cooked it in Kate’s frying pan. Kate scrubbed the pan and burned it but could never get the devil out of the pan, so she buried it in the woods, the woodcut of a young man stands stagnantly, holding a frying pan filled with the body of a rattlesnake. The man, his frying pan, and the snake within are fully developed in color and detail, while the stove in the almost non-existent background stands as a shadow of itself, minimal in its depiction. What makes this work so successful is its title, which fuels the narrative behind it. The details that Edgar chooses to flush out leave room for imagination. In this same way, you remember bits and pieces of your own memories and create historical narratives based upon the details left behind. On the other hand, Nica’s works hum flourescently with bright pinks and oranges native to her Peruvian heritage. Her Nazca works hang as reincarnated representations of the Nazca lines found across the Peruvian desert. Nica incorporates the bright colors found in La Mujer del Mercado as she creates Nazca drawings of her own, fusing together pre-Colombian and modern Peruvian culture to create something new.

These works represent the ever-hanging state of both memory and present experiences. What defined Peruvian culture 1300 years ago and how it’s defined today morphs itself into something entirely different as passing generations reinterpret and appropriate Peruvian history. In this way, both Nica and Edgar address the idea of permanence. In addressing this idea of permanence, Gone With the Twins reminds the viewer that people, places, and culture come and go—they die even in environments as sterile as the white walls of a gallery. Street art isn’t the only medium that fades with the passage of time, and, in playing with this concept, the artists smudge their label as street artists and fit comfortably in the gallery space.

The Paper Twins, Edward A. English, Diane Sold J.T.'s Land to a Tree Harvester, 2011. Photo courtesy Get This! Gallery.

Edgar’s grass had already started to wither when I visited Get This! Gallery almost two weeks ago, and I’m curious to see what shape it’s in come July 2nd when the show closes. The definition of the South presented by the Twins isn’t so much a commentary on the state of Atlanta as it is an examination of what Southerners love: a good narrative. The closest shot at modernity that the Twins take is in Nica’s Nuestra Señora de las Visas, a drawing of an immigrant Peruvian in traditional dress and a pair of Nike shoes. If anything, the Twins utilize similar means of communication to weave their own stories to share with their audience and with each other. “Don’t be fooled;” warn the Paper Twins, “experiences and stories are distorted with time and after the years you end up telling your stories the way you want to remember them, romanticizing hardship, chuckling at deep-rooted superstitions and seeing the past through affection-tinted eyes.” These are sobering words coming from a renegade duo known for plastering the streets with lighthearted compositions, but they challenge those preconceptions of street artistry and help redefine the Paper Twins in this seemingly foreign space. Here, the vacant gallery walls transform into the tabula rasa of the human experience, lending themselves more easily to artistic experiment than the ready-made streets of Atlanta. Working without the limitations of the street environment gives the Paper Twins license to create freely in whatever form most suitable to their creative needs; however, it’s clear that Edgar and Nica don’t plan on uprooting themselves from their foundation in the streets.

The Paper Twin’s exhibition, Gone With the Twins, will remain up at Get This! Gallery through July 2, 2011. To listen to an interview with the Paper Twins, check out BURNAWAY’s recent ARTSpeak on AM 1690, The Paper Twins Share Visions of Mississippi and Peru.

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Tags: Edgar, Get This! Gallery, La Mujer del Mercado, Nica, Nuestra Senora de las Visas, Oscar Jefferson found a rattlesnake and cooked it in Kate's frying pan. Kate scrubbed the pan and burned it but could never get the devil out of the pan, Paper Twins, Peruvian desert, Sang-ga, so she buried it in the woods, South, underwear trees

Jeremy Abernathy

I like the Paper Twins, but I think it does their work a disservice if we dwell too long on the surface of these two narratives: 1. Art on the street versus in the gallery (street artists work in the gallery all the time, and for the really successful ones, it’s a pretty common way of life) and 2. Mississippi has a lot in common with Lima, Peru.

Lima is a metropolis of 8 million people, while Mississippi’s largest city has less than 200,000 and its total state-wide population is roughly one quarter of the City of Lima, at less than 3 million. Of course, while it’s not fair comparison, it helps illustrate that Lima might have more in common with other Latin American cities like Rio de Janeiro. To fully follow the analogy, I suppose you could very loosely substitute the Civil War, between the federal Union and the Confederate rebels, with Peru’s conflicts between the State and leftist guerrillas like the Shining Path, but those were fought in the 1980s and 90s—over a hundred years after the Civil War, and with machine guns and machetes rather than rifles and cavalry sabers. Replace Mississippi’s crystal meth labs with the cocaine trade, and then substitute rural poverty/under-education with its urban equivalent, and you might have a roughly decent parallel. Still, it merits debate.

I don’t assume the artists mean to erase differences, but I think it’s important to respect and preserve differences so that other cultures aren’t clumsily and mistakenly assimilated into the Caucasian mainstream as it often happens in the U.S.

Similarly, as a native of Mississippi, I both identify and dis-identify with Edgar’s portrait of the rural South. My grandmother can still recite Smoky Mountain rhymes that, if I were a more diligent grandson, I’d record and preserve for posterity. She doesn’t have to play-act the Tennessee-mountain vernacular because she already speaks that way every day. But there’s something that smacks of suburban fantasy here …. (Grass is a symptom of suburban control over the environment, and even kudzu, the iconic Southern plant, was imported from Japan to “improve” and control the region’s wild soil. So many examples show that Southern authenticity is a flawed, complex impulse, of which I also am guilty from time to time.)

The vision here omits the strip malls now covering Mississippi, from Meridian to Oxford to Biloxi, as well as the noticeably rising number of Hispanic and Asian businesses opened up by immigrants. But it’s certainly a pleasant fantasy–these remembrances of bygone simpler days rendered in lovely cartoon outlines. I like this show, a lot, but I’m curious to examine things with a little more scrutiny.

Then again, I think this narrative is a willful transformation–perhaps the good kind of Utopianism, and one that the Paper Twins are consciously participating in, despite the tropical oceans and economic gulfs that divide Peru (a growing economy in a very poor part of the world) and Mississippi (one of the poorest states in the wealthiest country in the world, a status that still puts its residents well ahead the average South American). Something that’s hard to articulate, in drawings or even words, that appeals to our best moral sensibilities.

… Or do I sound far off?
Laura H

I think it is worthwhile to consider the Paper Twins’ usual working environment versus that of a gallery. Just because others have done it before, and perhaps succssfully, doesn’t mean it isn’t an interesting juxtaposition and something to note. I was very interested to see how the Twins’ work would transition into a gallery where the work would be viewed closely together and related to each other whether there was a narrative between the pieces or not. I thought that the fact there was a common narrative made the show more compelling as opposed to something like Living Walls where you may see spectacular work but it doesn’t necessarily challenge street artists to a cohesive story.

I also don’t think that the Paper Twins finding similiarities in their backgrounds is cause for worry and I think getting stuck on the technicalities of how they chose to represent their memories (or perhaps even what their memories consist of) is missing the point. I may have grown up in areas with strip malls and pollution but that doesn’t mean that is what I refer to when I remember my childhood. I would be surprised if details like the size of the population or the species of grass are details that stick out to someone if the memory-story wasn’t directly related to it. With Edgar’s Frying Pan piece I appreciated the faded oven as symbolic of some aspects of memory remaining clearer, or more important, than others. I didn’t feel in the article or in the Twins’ statement that they were trying to convince me their pasts were one in the same or that their childhood homes and environments were identical. The ways in which the artists differently presented their stories visually represented this to me, and I felt this was well captured in the above article.
Laura Chance

If there’s one thing I’d like to point out, it’s that there’s nothing in this article that says, “Mississippi has a lot in common with Lima, Peru.” There’s no trace of that coming from the Twins exhibition, either. As a southerner who is still very much connected to her Spanish roots, I’d be very uncomfortable making that kind of statement.

What the Twins are playing with here is a multi-faceted depiction of memory. Any overlapping similarities or connections drawn between the two cultures are indicative of any overarching human qualities. Sometimes the simple things, like flying a kite as a child, are enough to illicit a response from an audience and can do so more successfully because they’re easily accessible. I don’t think that’s a bad thing. As for any commentary on an idealized depiction of Southern culture, I am hesitant to read too deeply into the Paper Twins intentions on making a socioeconomic statement about the state of the south. What really resonated for me here was their resourceful use of mixed media to create an accurate representation of the flashes of imagery that I get when I start to wax nostalgic.

Lastly, I do think it’s important to mention a street artist presentation in a gallery. When I spoke with a few people about this exhibition, I encountered a mindset against the Twins displaying work at Get This!, “Why don’t they just stick to the streets?” If we aren’t going to challenge that kind of mentality, then it seems as if we’d be promoting a closed-minded (dare I say classist?) view of the arts.
Jeremy Abernathy

Please know that I post my comments with no disrespect to you, Laura, or to the artists Edgar and Nica.

My critique about the Mississippi & Peru narrative was not pointed at anything you wrote. I reviewed the artist statement, and it’s clear that the word they used was that they were “infatuated” with each other’s culture, SO I am mistaken about that, and I should have known better than to even suggest that was one of their goals, which I never meant to say.

Even though I was mistaken, I still think this conversation has value, or at least I hope it will.
Jeremy Abernathy

OK, maybe it’s better if we just start over ….

I think this is interesting, Laura:
“Lastly, I do think it’s important to mention a street artist presentation in a gallery. When I spoke with a few people about this exhibition, I encountered a mindset against the Twins displaying work at Get This!, “Why don’t they just stick to the streets?””

I didn’t realize people would be that narrow-minded about street artists showing in galleries. I should probably revise my point about the grass growing in the gallery, because it probably sounded like I didn’t like that part. Actually, it was one of my favorite things about this show, and it’s the sort of opportunity that galleries can provide artists to experiment with physical space (and in this case, people can appreciate the grass changing over time, an idea that goes at least as far back as the Fluxus movement. (Yoko Ono’s decaying apple installation was meant to decay over time in the gallery where it was on display.) There are always associations with art that the artist never intends (like my “suburban” comment above), but I think it actually reflects the complexity of memory and Southernness perfectly, that the artifice is part of who we are. These sort of contradictions are part of why I love art. I don’t really see the need to hate on galleries, especially when they’re giving a chance to young artists.