Current Exhibitions

May 2019 -May 2020

Undoubtedly, the blade came first– arrow heads, spearheads, knives.  Combining a sharp cutting blade with the ingenuity of the lever was the innovation that changed everything, yielding the elegant and indispensible tool we have been using for millennia. As a basic instrument of sewing, grooming, cooking, and gardening, scissors have an undeniable domestic air. And they are stereotypically thought of as a markedly “female” tool (their lightweight, accessible, ever-ready utility contrasting with the heavy, loud, panoply of stereotypically “manly” tools like power saws and jackhammers.) And perhaps, as is often the case, these connotations of “female” and “domestic” serve to obscure the immense consequence and power of this simple object. After all, what do scissors make possible? Revision, collage, pastiche, selection, parsing, styling, shaping, cutting loose, liberation, transformation! Scissors allow us to shape and create our environment – from trimming and restricting the fecundity of the natural world, to grooming and styling the growth of our own bodies. Scissors embody the ability to edit material, to remove what is not wanted or is unnecessary, to re-shape contours, alter a profile. Thus scissors also empower creation, as inevitably the act of cutting off leads also to putting things back together in new ways, from the quilter’s re-fashioning of cast off scraps into beautiful new textiles, to the tailor’s careful excision of cloth so that its pieces can be joined together to form a dazzling article of high fashion. In the kitchen, scissors alter the form of the food we eat, cutting spices and garnishes, meat and noodles – in the hand of a master chef turning proteins, vitamins and calories into works of art. Scissors are power. Every little kid feels the thrill of it when she takes them in hand for the first time – to cut! to shape! to make something! I can do it!

In English, the noun scissors is a plural noun and this hints at their duality. Everything that is powerful is also dangerous. Scissors can wound, stab and destroy. They are no joke. Their ubiquitous appearance in horror movies, nightmares, cautionary tales and superstitious beliefs, testifies to our subconscious awareness of their threat. This ambiguity perhaps, is also a part of their elegance, not just due to the pleasing physics of leverage, but also the dazzling motion of their meaning– they are a flashing, shining object that can be many things at once: domestic and comfortable, violent and horrifying, transformative, revolutionary – a bright, sharp, totem of possibility.

Photo Gallery Coming Soon!