Andreas Kocks, "Paperwork #935G" 2009. Photo: Ed Watkins

Cut, sliced, rolled. “Slash: Paper Under the Knife” is a collection of paper masterpieces brought together in the Museum of Art and Design (a.k.a. the MAD Museum).  Gliding open the elevator doors were eclipsed by a large black wall.  The form created was dark yet serene.  Glancing to the left, St. Peter was slaying a cardboard dragon.  Stepping off to my right pushed my imagine into a new world.  The paper pieces literally jumped off the floors and walls as all three dimensions were filled with browns, blacks, and whites.  Small men stood next to one another, minutely scaled, and fighting off fantastical beasts, as I walked past into a room of architectural marvels.

Olafur Eliasson brings us through Your House ironically a storybook in which he portrayed his own home in Denmark.  Constructed through the slow process of cutting separate sheets for each cross-section of his house, his book inspires awe when taking into account the tiresome job of slicing every page along with the creation of the stop motion video.  His book is over 400 pages long.  Behind, the screen displaying the video of movement through the house quickly leafs through it creating the effect of a magical tour.  It is an amazing display of dedication and skill.

Epic.  A word that came to mind to describe Rob Carter‘s visual masterpiece, Stone on Stone.  In an amazing display Carter took the tedious art of stop-motion animation and paper cutting mixed with whimsical sounds to create his Monty Python-esque video.  Carter portrayed growth over time as he constructed the cathedral of St. John the Divine and the gradual change from rural into an urban environment around it.  He had a unique style of paper curling over paper with the care to create the effect properly in which it seems as if the new is overlapping already existing pieces.  The paper shifts and flips in a way that brings a smile to your face and is paired with equally as lightening sound effects.

The show overall delivers; each piece has the same medium but at the same time completely different.  The two-floor exhibition drives your mind to realize the possibilities for every medium, let alone paper, as you see the vastly different works ranging from a three dimensional naked man pieced together in an array of colors to a stretched Quaker’s oatmeal container.  Each artist put true dedication and heart into their own pieces and with such limitless prospects its no wonder that I am telling you that visiting this exhibition is a must.