Paper Trails

Rae Helms and Peixuan Ouyang

Runs/ May 1 - 31, 2026

Reception/ Friday May 1, 6-9PM

Hours: Sat - Sun from 2-6PM

This May, Grizzly Grizzly presents Paper Trails, a two-person exhibition by Rae Helms and Peixuan Ouyang. The show brings together glass, found materials, prints, and moving image to look at grief, loss, and the disorientation of arriving somewhere that does not quite feel like your own. These works are made of fragments of places and objects, altered records, and impressions that point to how people are shaped by movement and how places are shaped in return. Both artists attempt to trace the voids and intangibility of holding a place that is constantly shifting. 

Rae Helms works with glass, print, and sculpture to rework found material, including documents and fragments of human-made records tied to specific places. Reflecting on cycles of use, neglect, and transformation, they use glass as a material that alters, magnifies, and distorts, placing it over these remnants so that information shifts as it is seen. In this exhibition, they present print-based collages centered on a large pane of window glass found on the street in Philadelphia, engraved with a repeating poem and propped against the wall like a fragment of a building. Treated as a remnant of a collapsed home, it holds traces of architectural loss and urban circulation, where discarded material becomes a kind of accidental record. This practice becomes an alternative mapping of narratives of loss, care, and resilience.

Peixuan Ouyang’s practice considers how images infiltrate and in turn structure how we move through the world. Working with film, video, print, and installation Ouyang shifts between time-based and tactile forms to explore the intersections of globalization, migration, monumentality and absurdity. In this exhibition, they present works from an ongoing Archive of Fear that takes shape through and reflects upon mundane, everyday objects. One work begins with a dent in a car, transferring its outline through rubbing to hold the form of an impact. Another alters a border-control fingerprint scanner, replacing its image-capture system with a looping moving image. Hovering at the edge of disappearance, these works ask what it means to hold onto a trace, to outline something as proof that it once existed within daily life, even as we are trained to ignore or grow accustomed to it, preserving a record for a future in which these fears may no longer terrify us.

Paper Trails brings together works that register touch, erosion, surveillance, damage and partial records. Treating documentation not as neutral or fixed, but instead as a poetic archive, this exhibition shows how traces are made through alteration, how fragments of place and experience are carried, shifted, and re-seen over time.

Artist Bios:

Rae Helms is an interdisciplinary artist based in Philadelphia whose work explores queerness, ephemera, archival history, and language through print media, photography, glass, and installation. Their work has been exhibited in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. Helms is the recipient of the Jennifer Tancreto Award from the Janet Turner Print Museum, the Dean’s Award at CSU Chico, and the Graduate Fellowship from Southern Graphics Council International. They received a BFA in Printmaking and a BA in Art History from California State University, Chico, and an MFA in Printmaking from Tyler School of Art and Architecture. 

Peixuan Ouyang works across film, video, moving-image installation, prints, and artist books to explore how images mediate everyday life and shape our relationships to the world and to one another. Their work has been exhibited internationally and in the United States at venues including the Walker Art Center, Arab Digital Expression Foundation, Syros International Film Festival, Gene Siskel Film Center, DCTV Firehouse Theater, Winnipeg Underground Film Festival, Roman Susan, The Research House for Asian Art, and Zhou B Art Center. Ouyang’s work has received a Special Mention at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, a Jury Award at ICDOCS, and Best Work for D-Normal/V-Essay in Hong Kong.