guest post by mikl-em

San Francisco artist Paul Hayes has a new installation at the SF Art Commission Gallery.

Paul’s work typically involves sheets of paper in mass quantities (thousands) crumple-formed into elemental shapes then suspended from thin wire in an open room. So a swarm of paper airplane corpses takes over, massing into something like an alien-organic body. Tiny movements persist at the slightest breeze, so the “body” is also always alive throughout. Paul has put up his art in empty storefronts, in warehouses, and in galleries.

This evening Paul gave a great informal talk about the new piece which is called “Drawing from Another Dimension” to a small crowd gathered outside the SFAC’s Window Site gallery. I shot some short videos and a few pix of the talk.

The piece is up through July 5. It’s a single large installation, positioned in the gallery window on Grove street near the corner of Van Ness (in Civic Center, right across Grove from City Hall). Here’s a map. The good news is you can walk by the window any hour of the day, no gallery hours to worry about. It really looks magical at night.

Paul’s installation work has been steadily growing in reputation over the last few years. His most seen piece is undoubtedly The Thing About Accumulation which was up for over a year at The Exploratorium. He had a piece up at the late Canvas Gallery for a long time, and more recently at Johansson Projects in Oakland (props to my pal Anneke for the cool Flickr sets of those pieces).

Here’s Paul’s flickr-stream for a look at both his installations and other art work.

See Previously: Liminality: Art on the Threshold

photo by Paul Hayes