Cheryl Pelavin Fine Arts is proud to announce a new exhibition by Cindy Kane. The exhibition is a unique transformation of the written word into visual art.

For many years Kane has been working with artifacts, incorporating sheet music, road maps, and cursive writing practice sheets from her children’s school work into her paintings. This process led to her thinking about what it might be like to paint on the original notes and manuscripts of writers. Kane was fascinated by the process that every writer has of transmitting thoughts into printed words, to see the raw notes, and the scrawled handwriting in the margins of a hand typed page. Her paintings give us the voyeuristic pleasure of seeing what was never meant to be seen. These original pages provided the backbone to this series of paintings which she calls Mapping Writers. The paintings are the outgrowth of this response to the iconography of handwriting and the intimacy of the written word.

“Here, words are like fossils in the hands of a gifted paleontologist, writes Journalist Ellen Pall in a catalogue essay for the show, forms that attest to the shape and vision of the vanished bodies that made them. The canvases blaze with Kane’s perception of the concentration and longing, the quick rapture and long manual labor that are a writer’s life.”

In her artist statement Kane writes: The Helmet Project was born out of my desire to pay tribute to journalists through my work as a visual artist. I began this project by inviting fifty foreign correspondents whose work I admire to join me in a collaboration which involved using their original notes from their travels as journalists.

After years of considering various icons which could support the notes and paper detritus which journalists save, I decided on the military helmet to provide the backbone of the installation. I have always been drawn to the role that journalists play in informing us about the events which shape history, and to the great tradition of the war correspondent.

The installation of fifty steel pot helmets hangs from the ceiling just below eye level in the configuration of a circle. Each helmet is covered with the original handwritten notes of the correspondents. The overall feeling as one walks through the space is one of reflection. The helmets have been used in battles, and the journalists notes record the despair of people trapped by war, poverty, and political oppression. Ultimately the helmets encircle the visitor in the journalists quests for truth, honoring their ability to bring us stories from embattled places on the earth.

Clayton Campbell, Artistic Director of the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, writes in his catalogue essay for the Helmet Project: “I do believe that Cindy Kane is at her peak, in this new but uncertain moment of social and political change, and her work makes a beautiful, poignant, and insightful contribution to the larger cultural conversation in which we must participate.”