Origami is jumping off the walls at the Springfield Museums complex. It’s bouncing off the ceiling, too.
“Above the Fold: New Expressions in Origami” features work by nine cutting-edge origamists. Each has an entirely individualistic approach to the art of paper folding, which got its start 1,000 years ago as gift exchanges among the nobility and Shinto purification rituals.
Robert Lang splashed paint in varying hues and patterns on 60 sheets of paper, folded each sheet into a koi fish and installed them swimming up and across a black wall, creating a striking “Vertical Pond.”
Vincent Floderer used the crumpling origami technique, using almost-indestructible meat-wrapping paper, to create nebulous creatures — are they fish? frogs? bugs? birds? does it matter? — and hang them from the ceiling with metallic threads.
Yuko Nishimura’s origami creations are large-scale, wall-mounted, cream-colored optical puzzles, dizzying and intricate. Miri Golan’s work references books and solidarity, springing out of her work teaching origami to both Jewish, Muslim and Christian children in Israeli schools. A four-part grid creation by Golan’s husband, Paul Jackson, focuses on an origamist’s most important working tools: his own hands. Jiangmei Wu’s massive “Ruga Swan” sits underneath Richard Sweeney’s hanging “Air.”
In the hall between the exhibit’s two galleries, work by Erik and Martin Demaine are beguiling in their structural complexity. The father and son, two “computational origamists” from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, form twisting creations. Some of them sit inside blown glass. Some of them are made from pages of a book “The Destructors” by Graham Greene, the book that inspired the movie “Donnie Darko.” In turning the book into origami, it becomes unreadable because “destruction after all is a form of creation.”
“ABOVE THE FOLD: NEW EXPRESSIONS IN ORIGAMI” will be at the D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, 21 Edwards St. in Springfield, until April 12. springfieldmuseums.org.
