"TRAVELOGUE" AT CARROLL SQAURE
The Washington Post, Friday, August 27, 2010; Style Section C04
By JESSICA DAWSON,

Foon Sham - who just gets more interesting as the years go by - did a 2009 artist residency in Hospitalfield, Scotland (couldn't have made that up), and left with a poetic group of conceptual drawings.

For some time now, Sham's been working with trees and their manmade byproducts. One of his favourite materials is the phone book. (For the unfamiliar: THis volume binds thousands of tissue-thin pages listing phone numbers and addresses.) At Carroll Square, Sham expands on earlier themes while playing the edge between sculpture and drawing, object and illusion, image and text.

Several works find Sham beginning with a small wood chip, the kind offered as a sample at a flooring store. These squares and rectangles, each a few inches long, are identified with a handwritten label - "elm," "weathered sycamore," "beech."

For "Yew," Sham affixed a chip to paper and drew extensions of the wood grain's striations in pencil. The artist traced the wood's lines into the concentric circles of the original tree's ring. It's as if Sham were returning a hacked-up, retail-ready fragment to its natural state.

Sham also reconstitues nature from the manmade by using diced-up phone books. In one artwork, he mounted a small section of one old volume, fanning the paper out from its binding. Sham then drew fingers of graphite extending from each leaf, as if expanding the book to its original proportions. Of course, Sham's uncertain, hand-drawn lines look nothing like machine-tooled paper, so his imagined phone-book sheaths end up looking organic. They're something like a river delta as seen on a map.

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