The Eastern Star Gallery presents our second show of the school year, Cornucopia, featuring the work of Philadelphia-based artist Paper Buck. Buck delivers a selection of works focused on location-centered research that explores white settler constructions of conservation, ecology, and the "American Landscape.” Several paintings from his body of work, Amnesia with a Vista, are on view. These pieces reframe colonial land maps and documentation of industrial clearcutting found in the artist’s hometown archives, alongside references to contemporary natural gas development and the work of the Hudson River School painter, Thomas Cole. The piece Cornucopia, Or, An Essay On American Scenery (After Wendy Red Star and Thomas Cole), from which the show’s title is formed, is also featured. In the piece, Buck uses the panoramic space of the image to explore contradictions embedded in historical/contemporary settler nationalist discourses of manifest destiny, conservation, and energy security. The exhibition Cornucopia brings together bodies of Paper Buck’s work from 2015 to the present.
Paper Buck is an interdisciplinary visual artist, printmaker, and writer. His practice is informed by a background in community organizing that centers on anti-racist education, decolonial movements, and transgender justice. He currently lives and works in Philadelphia, where he teaches printmaking at the University of the Arts. Paper received his MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2020 and earned a Bachelor's degree in Studio Art from Macalester College in 2008. Paper was previously a leadership team member at the Transgender, Gender-Variant, and Intersex Justice Project, Unsettling Minnesota, and the Catalyst Project. He also previously worked at Kala Art Institute as the Printmaking Studio Manager. Now, he works with artist Erin Mallea publishing a collaborative artist newsletter, Tree News.
Cornucopia opens Wednesday, December 14, and will be on view until Friday, February 3, 2023. Please join us for the opening celebration on Wednesday, December 14, from 7:30 - 8:30 p.m. The night of the opening, Paper Buck will be joining us virtually for a gallery walk-through at 7:45 p.m.
You can view more of Paper Buck’s work at www.paperbuck.net
