Paper Trails

Take a strip of paper, twist one end, and pull the edges together, and you have yourself a Möbius strip, a three-dimensional object with just one extended surface. In that way, a sheet of paper becomes something like a wormhole, a structure which connects distant points in spacetime. Kyoko Hamaguchi and tamara suarez porras’s paper and cardboard-based works, on view in “Paper Trails,” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Bushwick, are similarly investigations into the transportive and otherworldly potential of ordinary objects.

In porras’s 11x14'' gelatin silver prints, images culled from scientific texts, instruction manuals, books, and magazines, are layered, torn, folded, collaged, and set against stark black backgrounds, collapsing the darkroom and the endless deep of space. observed only once and may one day reappear (2020) [pictured], for instance, depicts a torn sheet folded twice on a bias. A galactic body zooming through space heads toward the right of the frame—but if it follows the bend of the sheet instead, it’ll come back around the other side.

Hamaguchi’s “Postal Summary” works, made of collapsed or reconfigured shipping boxes, also reference the darkroom process. She creates a rudimentary camera obscura out of a post office box by slathering the inside with light-sensitive photo emulsion and piercing a pinhole in one side, which records the box’s progress as she ships it to herself. Lording over the exhibition is the icon-like Space Watcher (2020), a pinhole camera made of drywall, which sits in the corner like a watchful pyramid, recording the exhibition itself.