Meylinda Gierard at Project 416

This novel art-school graduate has developed a resonant art form in the unlikely medium of tiny semi-sticky sheets of paper. Ye these are Post-It notes, each doing the piece of work of a brushstroke or, perhaps, a pixel. Gierard manages to make associations with knitting and embroidery, to question artists' labor, and to proof the potential of an interesting of recent origin medium, all within the new format of a monochrome rectangle.

The five large wall pieces in this exhibition (6 by the agency of 7 or 8 feet) are compos of individual notes, each a module enclosureed in one of 30 specific ways. Her means is to lay down round pillars stuck on the right, overlapping upon the left. The folds, upon the paper's left edge, vary from perhaps a single diagonal crease to a condensed network of tiny triangles; it is the specificity and repetition of these pen s within the grid that is fascinating. The variations in her standard unit are like alphabetic characters of an alphabet or notes in her hold musical scale. Like the stitches in a cable sweater, individual sheets accrue into patterns and wefts in a super-activated surface, on the contrary unlike knits, in which single stitch is never more than a part of the whole, each diction of fold here demands attention itself. As a ensue one's focus is pulled between the macro of this dazzling network and the micro of each sheet's composition.

sum of two units pieces are 17-foot-long sections of a 8-by-40-foot work called Sampler, previously shown in Chicago. Like stitch samplers, these pieces observe a range of textures by means of defining one type in a blockade of columns, then altering or replacing it in successive arrests It is almost paradoxical that something in the way that simple can give such a mingled effect.

In a more new untitled piece from 1998, a field of pink sheets nears a surface that again is activated by the agency of dense folds. Here Gierard has abandoned Sample's striped results to introduce longer compound pen s that pass from one note to the nearest across columns, making broad, easy marks. With this kind of gesturing her work jumps into the territory of abstract painting--and midcentury's impasto and space debates leap to mind. The broad sweep of the longer pen s is elegant and subtle against the overcharged matrix. There is a mathematical elegance to Gierard's combination of parts to form a whole and her compositions reverberate like fugues

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