Garden of Mutei is an exhibition of new compositions by Karen Margolis, featuring works from the Brooklyn artist’s “Integration” series, her most significant compositions thus far, crafted from burned, painted and threaded paper.

The exhibition title refers to a beginning stage of emptiness where shape can emerge. Margolis cultivates her compositions out of this darkened area, weaving ephemeral ideas and ideas into tapestries of vibrant colors. The circle recurs throughout her works as the artist’s primary way of communication, the embodiment of both infinity and perfection and within her reinterpretation of negative and positive space.

“I search for the connective tissues between the world and the microscopic. I’ve discovered it in the circle. It pertains everything. As the most elementary component in the world, the circle is seen in all of nature in addition to in religious symbols representing infinity, devotion, and totality,” Margolis describes.

To make her incredible tapestries, Margolis burns holes into Abaca paper in the act of removal that she balances by painting as well as sewing map fragments to the paper. The artist’s latest works are scaled to over double the size of her first “Integration” compositions, incorporating a wider set of colors and dense concentrations of ribbon. The threadwork provides the appearance of coming together while also seemingly falling apart, two straight opposed notions which reference creation and destruction, an intrinsic characteristic of her job.

Simultaneously, the functions could be read as extreme emotional portraits: a translation of significance into visual routines. In every one of the functions, Margolis references a color chart she created, in which every color variation is representative of a designated emotion. Implementing this particular code, Margolis records private feelings and inner monologues to her arty compositions as a chronicle of the organized chaos of operations within the mind. This way, Margolis imbues the article with significance, in addition to encrypting it to obfuscate comprehension.