NEW YORK, NY.- Passing Through, an enthralling exhibition of new works on paper by Sky Pape that probes the intrigue of time, space, scale as reflection on continuity and transience, opened at the June Kelly Gallery, 166 Mercer Street, on September 7. The work will remain on view through October 10.

Pape says this body of work continues her earlier series Time Being - that began with the figure eight loop of the infinity symbol. Here, she expands to more complex continuous knots interwoven with shapes and lines that shift within the pictorial space, and shoot off the edges as in the painting, Cross My Heart. Pape describes her process as moving back and forth between exactitude and intuition, entwining both.

“Everything is in motion. We’re all just passing through. We stop. Look. Linger, Move on. Circle back and leave again,” Pape says. Her paintings have a dynamism that pulse with energy. And she creates a spatial language and a sense of balance with dominant lines and hints of architectural forms in unbroken hues.

In this exhibition, poignant and provocative images demonstrate Pape’s inexhaustible interest in drama of life and creation of drama with form. She constructs each composition with dissimilar entities, opposing forms, the vertical against the horizontal, connection with disruption. Endless looping gestural lines in Sumi ink become directional paths as they overlap in repetitive patterns. Shifting perception defers to ambiguity.

Pape’s hard edge language evokes minimal abstraction partnered with a sense of coexistence between cosmic depth and perpetual passage as in the painting Day Into Night. The painting CelNav is a futuristic spin with tension between illusionistic pictorial space and dominant forms forcing alternate course.

Pape’s works are complex but her evocative imagery reflects her sensibility with capturing the lyricism of spirit and energy in transient moments while yet paying homage to both the figurative and abstract.

Pape, a native of Toronto, Canada, lives and works in New York City. She studied art at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and at Parsons School of Design and the Art Students League in New York. She spent a month in 2010 in Bellagio, Italy, on a fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Pape has shown in many solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, Canada and Europe. Her work is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, Dyke Industries, Little Rock, Arkansas, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska and Cirque du Soleil, Montreal, Canada.