Shapes & Thresholds is a hands-on workshop led by Paul David Mascot.

Using modular kits of monochromatic paper shapes, participants enter a slowed encounter with visual elements. Through stillness and motion the shapes function as sites of attention, redirecting focus away from outcome and toward sensation. How does balance register? How does tension accumulate or release? How does coherence begin to appear and just as easily destabilize?

Seeing is often compromised. In everyday life, images arrive rushing us toward recognition, preference, and replacement. Shapes & Thresholds re-introduces us to the art of seeing — how true response becomes possible when attention is held without assurance.

By working at the level of relation rather than representation, participants experience how coherence, intensity, and dissonance are generated—not imposed. Even pleasure, discomfort, and aversion are not treated as endpoints, but as tuning forks of one’s innate artistry.

While Mascot’s broader practice often embraces ornament, figuration, and images that surface vividly, Shapes & Thresholds temporarily steps away from image in order to study the conditions that make images powerful in the first place.

Ultimately, the workshop offers a space to practice staying with edges — training the eye through the body and the body through seeing.

RSVP:
SESSION 1 — 12–1 PM, January 25
SESSION 2 — 3–4 PM, January 25