Francesca Pastine

Gallery Affiliations: Eleanor Harwood Gallery, Dean Jensen Gallery

Region: Pacific Coast

Website: http://francesca.pastineart.com

City / State: San Francisco, CA

My work is engaged in re-contextualizing and subverting icons of cultural production. Using the folk tradition of paper cutting, my time-intensive and hands-on process conflates economic and political conditions with my lived experience.

I began my Art Forum Excavation series as an unsolicited collaboration with both the magazine and the cover artist. Starting with the covers, I cut, bend, manipulate, pull, and dig my way through their pages, revealing a visceral topography of art trends. Maintaining a strong connection to the physicality of drawing, my X-acto blade mimics a pencil, subtracting rather than adding.

I also intricately cut into the pages of The New York Times as a way to insert myself into larger global narratives. Whether transforming the stock report pages of the Times into lace-like spider webs or using the entire Section A to create a tangle of red-ink, my work strives to suffuse the inanimate with emotional power, creating a palpable complexity of form and information.