IPCNY: New Prints 2011/Autumn

This past weekend I had the good fortune to attend Print Week in New York.  I made my way to the IFPDA Fair at the Park Avenue Armory, the Editions/Artists' Book Fair in Chelsea, where I was exhibiting with Cade Tompkins Editions/Projects (pics to follow in a separate post), and the International Print Center's current exhibition, which includes one of my works.  As always, the Fairs were a whirlwind of visual over-stimulation and catching up with friends and colleagues you don't see every day.  Stepping into the IPCNY show on Saturday afternoon was a respite from the hustle and bustle, and it was a really nice show, full of exciting work.  Below are the curatorial essay and images from the opening reception, courtesy of the IPCNY.  Enjoy!

NEW PRINTS 2011/AUTUMN 

Curatorial Essay by Sarah Kirk Hanley

image courtesy IPCNY

The most fascinating – and simultaneously daunting – aspect of printmaking is its diversity.  Printmaking has been a means of expression for hundreds of years, and myriad techniques have evolved over time to fit the changing needs of artists.  As the twenty-first century unfolds, artists are working in a dizzying array of approaches.  The New Prints Program at International Print Center New York--now in its second decade--is unique in its effort to document the full range of this activity as it develops. 

image courtesy IPCNY

For each exhibition, entries are solicited from artists around the world, and a panel of jurists selects the strongest examples from this pool to represent a cross-section of the varied nature of printmaking activity today.  Artists whose work attracts a wide following – in this case, Ed Ruscha, William Kentridge, Alex Katz, Polly Apfelbaum, Jessica Stockholder, John Himmelfarb, Whitfield Lovell, Charles Hinman, Jane Kent, Norman Ackroyd and Joan Snyder – are shown alongside emerging artists and those who have established a strong reputation in regional, academic, or professional circles.  In the eyes of the jurists, each of these works merits consideration on its own terms.

image courtesy IPCNY

For some artists, printmaking is a primary means of expression, but most see printmaking as an alternative medium that complements their work in other formats.  Whether a preferred medium or a secondary one, most artists create their prints with a time-honored process: a concept is developed and then composed on one or more matrices using one or more categories of printmaking (intaglio, relief, lithography, screenprinting, digital) and the techniques that best suit their intention – the final result is editioned in the number of impressions they determine, on a paper of their choosing.  Some play with techniques or materials to tease out new effects within these parameters, while others invent entirely new approaches.  Still others use printmaking as a foundation through which to express themselves in a three-dimensional format – with books, installations, or sculptures.  In any of these endeavors, an artist might collaborate with a master printer in an established workshop that provides support and sophisticated technologies, or simply work from a private studio to produce editions or unique works on his or her own. 

image courtesy IPCNY

The prints on view in New Prints 2011/Autumn represent a wide range of topics that major contemporary artists are exploring-- from the portraiture of Alex Katz, to socially-grounded works of William Kentridge and Whitfield Lovell, to the abstract and formal expressions of Polly Apfelbaum, Joan Snyder, Jessica Stockholder, and Charles Hinman.  In the same way, many emerging artists are drawn to the expressive possibilities of traditional printmaking and bring fresh ideas and/or approaches to the medium.  Pete Williams and So Yoon Lym have used lithography and etching respectively to convey their interest in socio-political issues; Williams' From the Banks of the Chongqing 1 symbolically expresses the recent radical changes to the Chinese landscape in its transformation to a major economic power, while Lym’s James: Solar Etched is part of her ongoing exploration of plaited hairstyles as a marker of identity.  Isabel Gouveia’s unique intaglio works, which combine cut-out elements in a puzzle-like fashion, demonstrate a fresh approach to formal abstraction.  The return of the narrative – a powerful undercurrent in contemporary art – is found in the work of Erika Adams, Michael Neff, Curtis Bartone, Sharon Levy, and Alejandro Chen Li, who juxtapose compositional elements in unexpected ways to elicit humor, surrealism, or revulsion.  Personal narrative is the subject of Odette England’s series Without Me, in which she takes a digitally-printed photograph from her family album and physically cuts herself out of the image.  In a similar vein, Matthew Colaizzo’s and Serena Perrone’s seemingly straightforward landscapes become increasingly macabre as the viewer engages more deeply with the imagery to uncover a hidden story. 

A handful of artists in this exhibition have pushed traditional techniques beyond their customary use to generate innovative effects.  Ed Ruscha has transformed his now iconic Standard station image -- which he first editioned in the mid-1960s in screenprints of varying color combinations – into an albinic version of itself, cleverly titled Ghost Station.   The print was created with the Mixografía® process, developed in the early 1970s, which involves pressing paper pulp into a three-dimensional relief mould that is customarily inked in advance – when the paper is removed, it takes on the form of the mould as well as the colors that were applied to it.  Ruscha’s unprecedented choice to leave the mould un-inked results in a print that is both visually and conceptually elegant.  Likewise, Susan Goethel Campbell, Trevor Banthorpe, Grace Bentley-Scheck, Erin Diebboll, and Bob Shore have played with both traditional and newer techniques to create effects that transport their landscape imagery into the sublime.  Yuko Fukuzumi and Gary Justis likewise achieve technical and perceptual sleight-of-hand in their abstracted images.

image courtesy IPCNY

The exhibition also includes several prints that demonstrate new and experimental approaches.  Rosaire Appel and Soledad Salamé have worked in a purely digital aesthetic that could not have existed prior to the invention of the personal computer – this is a development that will likely become more prevalent as artists learn to fully exploit the possibilities of working entirely within the parameters of technology.   Ian Ruffino’s unique process (explained in full detail on his website) involves either layering, punching, and/or piercing prints – sometimes he adds hand-additions or sews them with bookbinding thread.  Rachael Browning’s Ledger series uses common office materials and techniques to create otherworldly abstractions.  Marie Yoho Dorsey’s Starry Night – an intaglio print on gampi paper embellished with Japanese-style embroidery – brings together dichotomies of high- and low-brow materials and East/West techniques and ideas. 

image courtesy IPCNY

Preeti Sood and Miguel Aragón– who are immigrants to Great Britain and the U.S., respectively – use the relatively new technology of laser engraving to comment on the cultures in which they were raised, using found imagery from their native homes as source material.  Sood’s Patriarchy shows an exterior wall plastered with gridded posters containing cookie-cutter portraits of adult Indian males –details have been selectively removed to suggest the anonymity of power as well as the losses experienced by those who have none.  Aragón’s sophisticated and entirely innovative approach begins with photographs of drug-cartel violence from the newspaper in his native Ciudad Juárez (or Juárez), which is situated directly opposite El Paso near the border of Texas and Mexico and has one of the world’s highest rates of violent crime.  Aragón laser-engraves the newspaper photos of “incomprehensible violence” (artist’s statement) to four-ply chipboard at varying depths.  In the process, the board is burned. Aragón then removes certain areas of the matrix with a drypoint needle to add texture.  He then takes a unique intaglio impression from the charred residue, which serves as the “ink.”  The resulting image – which appears almost abstract at first – slowly coalesces into a whole.  The prints have a liminal, otherworldly, and haunting quality that echoes the imperfection of memory and perception, while the embossed terrain implies the physicality and permanence of the crime.  Aragón’s burned images directly correlate to the damage they have imposed on the citizens of Juárez, which have been likewise burned into the collective memory.

image courtesy IPCNY

 A handful of works in the exhibition demonstrate a technical proficiency and attention to detail that dazzles.  Norman Ackroyd’s sublime aquatint landscapes, Marcin Bialas’ haunting etchings of architectural spaces, Nicolas Brown’s highly detailed linocut landscapes, Rick Finn’s intricate reduction woodcuts, and Takuji Hamanaka’s ethereal woodblock prints of textile designs all demonstrate fascinating and subtle effects.  Each of these artists fully exploit the possibilities of his chosen technique.

image courtesy IPCNY

Artists’ books and multiples, which are created to be interacted with and handled, are represented here in a number of works that are clever, contemplative, or political in nature.  How to display book objects is an eternal dilemma for galleries and museums – it is difficult to protect them from damage while also allowing visitors to experience them as the artists intended.  Jane Kent, who has worked in the book format for several decades, anticipated this problem in Skating, which can be either displayed on a wall or enjoyed in sequence as individual sheets.  The work is both meditative and clever, and its content is paired ingeniously to the book’s form (for an in-depth discussion of this book, see Susan Tallman, “Jane Kent and Richard Ford Go Skating” in Art in Print I, no. 2 [July-August 2011]: 16-20).  Two works by Michael Loderstedt demonstrate his divergent interests: Ghost Coutureis an inventive and witty piece of paper engineering, while the Queen of Amsterdam metaphorically considers our “fragile stewardship of the natural world” (artist’s statement online).   Tomi Um’s Little Operacleverly uses the accordion-fold format both as a means of developing a narrative and augmenting the graphic impact of the imagery.  Terry Conrad’s carefully designed Manipulatives is a series of abstract bendable objects of the artist’s creation that are housed in a box that serves as both container and means of display. 

image courtesy IPCNY

On a more serious note, books serve as a format for socio-political expression in Susan Goethel Cambell’s Dirty Pictures: Portraits of Air, Vol. 1 and Anne LaFond’s Advance.  Campbell’s piece documents a project in which the artist asked participants throughout the world to install air filters of uniform size in “a place of their choosing so it could pick up particulates in the atmosphere” (artist’s website).  LaFond’s expressionistic etchings respond to the recent uprising in Egypt.  On the more meditative end of the scale, Elaine Chow’s Year of Oxalis 1 recalls the elegant packaging of Japanese retailers of the past – a lost art that she memorializes here.  Isabell Ayotte’s Là où je ne suis pas (There Where I am Not) is a sophisticated pairing of words and imagery.  The book is quiet, minimal, and poetic, evoking a mysterious sense of loss.  The first spread reads, “pour ajouter à l’hiver j’ai ferme les volets / j’ai menti” (to augment winter I closed the shutters / I lied); second spread: “je ne sais pas s’il faul rompre le fil ou le tisser” (I didn’t realize that I must break the cord or weave it); third spread “le sol s’effondre” (the sun collapsed); final spread “je n’ai pas bougé pendant mon absence” (I did not leave during my absence).

image courtesy IPCNY

Prints and printmaking materials have been put to use for sculptural ends by several artists in the exhibition.  In Blue Motive, John Himmelfarb covered a wooden frame with relief prints in his signature blocky geometric style, to playful effect.   S.V. Medaris also surfaced a wooden form with a printed image in Carcasses (from The Meat Locker series) – the work is potent in scale and graphic impact.  Jerrod Beck’s unique approach sidesteps adhesion of a print to another form; instead, he recycles intaglio plates as moulds for a plaster-cast form – in effect, fusing the process into one step. 

image courtesy IPCNY

Print-based installation, which is sometimes called “printstallation,” is an exciting new direction for the medium that has become increasingly prevalent in recent years.  In this format, artists use printed materials as building-blocks to create sculptural or installation works.  This approach allows artists to extend printmaking to a scale that is not limited by the size of the matrix or the printing press, allowing for fresh avenues of expression and conceptual exploration.  Golnar Adili’s Pink Letter, Shawn Bitters’ Nature Shadows Him, and Libby Hague’s My One and Only Life So Far represent some of the directions this new format has taken.

image courtesy IPCNY

The variety and scope of the works in this exhibition demonstrate the vitality and range of printmaking in contemporary art.  Whether artists are drawn to the medium’s unique aesthetic properties, its versatility, or its reproducibility (or all of these qualities), they continue to push the boundaries and reinvent the medium for a new generation.   As the New Prints Program at IPCNY moves forward, followers can look forward to a brilliant chronicle of work by some of the most talented artists of the day who find inspiration in this chameleonic and sophisticated medium.