Joan Giordano, Start Spreading the News, 2015. Mixed media, handmade paper, archival New York Times, and encaustic on board, dimensions variable.

Joan Giordano

New York

June Kelly Gallery

Joan Giordano’s recent exhibition “Woven in Time” spoke to both the history of art and postmodern phenomena. Her constructions, which straddle the boundaries of painting, collage, and sculpture, can be compared to Kurt Schwitters’s “Merz” Her process begins when she selects an issue from the global news and prints the sometimes-illustrated article on heavy-weight archival watercolor paper to preserve it, before rolling, twisting, and/or scorching it. By soaking the paper, she is able to shape it into dimensional forms directly on the wall, which she combines with other materials before painting the entire composition. She uses encaustic, because this waxbased medium intensifies color and permanently seals the surface. In Epoch, Giordano rolled lithographs of New York Times newspapers together with real international newspapers to create vertical citylike forms. The Digital Fortress, a techno-thriller by Dan Brown, comes to mind.…see the entire review in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.