In the galleries: Tales that unfold from the folding of paper
Natalie Cheung’s “Finding Anna 1,” 2016, four 12″x12″, watercolor and gouache on paper, at Morton Fine Art. (Natalie Cheung/Morton Fine Art )
All six artists in Morton Fine Art’s “Handmade: Made by Hand” are showing works on paper, yet not all of them give a sense of handicraft. The surface appears pristine in Avi Gupta’s muted photographs of home interiors, which focus on light and shadow, and in Natalie Cheung’s blue-on-white renderings of leaves, which intentionally resemble cyanotypes. The skin is harder worked in Rosemary Feit Covey’s large, mysterious pictures of bone piles, which are partly engraved and partly painted, and layered with glue and polymer.
Julia Mae Bancroft’s “Beyond the Pale,” 2016, 10″x10″, collage, mixed media and hand-stitching on photograph. (Julia Mae Bancroft/Morton Fine Art)
Julia Mae Bancroft literally stitches together her “Mending Moments” collages, sewing wool, hemp and bamboo fibers into the photo-based compositions. Nigerian-born Victor Ekpuk draws and paints on paper, but his imagery employs symbols from an African writing system once incised into wood, metal and ceramics. Nate Lewis literally cuts and scrapes, transforming black-and-white photos of black men with a range of patterns and textures. These vivid, almost sculptural portraits suggest ritual scarification and the tufts of woven fabric. They also signify possible metamorphoses that are more than skin deep.
Morton Fine Art: curator's notes 
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