Chakaia Booker is an American artist who lives and works in Newark, New Jersey. Her most known works are massive, intricate sculptures made of re-purposed materials. Booker often employs various weaving and crafting techniques in her sculpture pieces. Her latest series, “A fluid space projective space”, currently on view at David Krut Projects in New York, takes the artist’s signature style to two dimensions.

The title of this exhibition comes from Booker’s process of cutting and rearranging materials to create a corpus-like cluster of pattern and texture. She describes this process as fluid, and subject to the rhythm and flow of discovering new shapes, colors, and compositions through the offerings of the printmaking process.

The term projective space refers to how the perspective of the human eye translates a three-dimensional reality through to a two-dimensional lens or plane. In these works, Booker pushes the boundaries of this unique relationship between the sculptural world and the projective flatness of the image, linking her process of creating these works-on-paper to that of her large-scale sculptural works she is best known for – assemblages made of discarded rubber tires that are cut, looped, and layered into towering beings.

Each work-on-paper is unique and created in collaboration with Master Printer Phil Sanders of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, a collaboration that began in 2009. Under Sanders’ guidance and printmaking expertise, Booker takes full advantage of the tools in the printmaking workshop, marking woodblocks with drills, chisels, and grinders before inking them to create elaborate patterned papers from which she excavates her cut and rearranged pieces. The resulting lyrical compositions of finely layered Japanese papers act as emblems of her intuitive process – creating an optical duel between the two-dimensional picture plane, and the physical fact of paper’s raw materiality.