Come early at 2:30 for a light reception and origami craft led by Emily Winckler of the Consulate-General of Japan in Nashville.
When you look at a piece of paper, what do you see? If your answer is a flat, two-dimensional square, then Between The Folds will astound you. Blurring the mysterious lines between art, science, sculpture and math, the film is an exhilarating adventure into origami, or paper folding, featuring works of art whose emotional expressiveness and engineering complexity defy logic. The eccentric artists and scientists in BETWEEN THE FOLDS envision the three-dimensional possibilities of paper and change the mundane into the poetic and magical—all without scissors, tape or glue. Ultimately, the medium of paper folding itself—a blank, uncut square—emerges as a resounding metaphor for the creative potential in us all.
ITVS Community Cinema in Nashville, a free documentary screening series presented by Nashville Public Television, Nashville Public Library and Hands On Nashville, is proud to present an exclusive screening of Between The Folds with special partners Zeitgeist Gallery and the Consulate-General of Japan in Nashville. The screening will take place Sunday, November 15, at 3 p.m. at the downtown branch of the Nashville Public Library and will be followed by a panel discussion with Lain York, local artist and gallery manager at Zeitgeist Gallery in Hillsboro Village, Dr. Victoria Greene, professor of physics and executive dean, Vanderbilt University College of Arts & Sciences, and Malachi Brown, local computer programmer/origami artist. Andy Miller, Belmont University Math Professor, will moderate.
Participants are invited to come early at 2:30 for a light reception and origami craft led by Emily Winckler of the Consulate-General of Japan in Nashville .
Directed, written and produced by Vanessa Gould, Between The Folds will premiere on Nashville Public Television on the PBS series Independent Lens in December.
BETWEEN THE FOLDS chronicles ten people whose lives have been transformed by paper folding. From artists to physicists to educators, many have abandoned careers and hard-earned graduate degrees—all to forge unconventional lives as modern-day paper folders.
While they may have come to origami through different experiences and for a variety of reasons, common threads emerge; paper folding consumes them, they talk about it in musical terms and many of these provocative and highly intelligent people practice paper folding because, well, it’s fun!
The film opens with three of the world’s foremost origami artists—a former sculptor in France folding caricatures rivaling the figures of Daumier and Picasso; a hyperrealist who walked away from a successful physics career to challenge the physics of a folded square instead; and an artisanal papermaker who folds impressionistic creations from the very same medium he makes from scratch.
However, as the film progresses, the artists become less conventional, and the post-modern concepts of abstraction, minimalism, deconstruction, process and empiricism take root —mirroring modern art itself. Abstract artists emerge with a greater emphasis on process and concept, rattling the fundamental roots of realism that have long dominated traditional paper folding. Eventually science emerges as another front in the exploration of folded paper—featuring advanced mathematicians and a remarkable scientist from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT who won the MacArthur “Genius” Award for his computational origami research.
While debates arise on issues of technique, symbolism and purpose, the film ultimately culminates with the notion that art and science are two different interpretations of the very same world around us.
