|
Untitled Document
|
New PrintsMarch 13-April 17
Prints from the International Print Center of New York.
Opening reception Thursday, March 13th 4:30-6:30
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Curatorial Essay
Brett Littman
I have always liked prints.
In contrast to many of my colleagues, I am attracted to anachronistic techniques. This is probably due to spending my formative years in the field at UrbanGlass, a glass studio and school in Brooklyn, and then at Dieu Donné Papermill, a hand papermaking facility that was in SoHo and now is in the Fashion District in New York. I like reproducibility. I like process. I like collaborations between master craftspeople and artists.
I started buying prints and multiples early on because I could afford them. Sometimes I am convinced that prints are actually better than artists' other works. Maybe in printing they find something that tightens their line, or allows them to play with the composition and the image in way they cannot in other mediums like paint, video or installation.
So overall, I would classify myself as a print enthusiast.
That said, I was very pleased to be invited to participate as a member of the Selections Committee for the New Prints: Winter 2008 exhibition. Our committee was comprised of: Gregory Amenoff, artist and Chair of Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts; Ruth Bowman, arts educator and collector; Bill Hall, Master Printer, Pace Prints; Susan Inglett, Susan Inglett Gallery/I.C. Editions; Dona Warner, Executive Director, Dieu Donné Papermill and me. This group represented a great cross-section of the arts community of collectors, dealers, educators, master printers and directors of non-profits. I can’t say that we all saw eye to eye in terms of our choices for inclusion in the show, but the dialogue was impassioned, direct and engaging, which to me means that we were on to something.
After the first “lightning” round we opted to not curate a thematic exhibition. Although Susan Inglett rightly pointed out that there was a predominance of war imagery in the pool of submissions, there was also enough work dealing with architecture, abstraction, and figuration to make thematic shows about these ideas as well. In the end, we decided to take a general approach which would allow us to choose prints that best represented both excellence and
daring in terms of technique and content.
What was interesting was that out of thirty four-artists that we chose, twenty-four printed independently. Also, there was a very good distribution of artists from across the country.
This speaks highly of both independent printing and the art activities in seemingly non-art locations around the nation.
I personally was drawn to many of the works that dealt with architecture and topology and which articulated understructure, three-dimensional perspective, and sketched out “projective” architectural forms that defy engineering. The standout works in these categories are: AWG’s Mudslide #1, a silkscreen and map collage; Miguel Cardenas’s Structure, an etching and aquatint; Michael Dal Cerro’s Model Homes for the Motor Age, a woodblock print; Roland Fisher’s Facades on Paper III, photographic screenprints published by Durham Press; Rebecca Foster’s 360 degrees, an etching; Cody Hoyt’s An Actual Letter Drawing, a silkscreen with etching, photo lithography and graphite; Alysia Kaplan’s Million$ House (Grosse Pointe, MI and Whitley Heights, LA), silkscreen on ultrachrome inkjet; and Fred Wilson’s THE MASTER PLAN or In Between the Big Bang and Modern Art is the Restroom, two photogravures.
We were all intrigued by three entries that dealt with printing in sculptural terms: Nadine Bariteau’s 3 gouttes d’eau au sol, a screenprint on bent wood; Matthew DiClemente’s Patriot Nuclear Submarine 1/8 scale wooden model kit, laser cut balsa wood with a serigraph package; and Alyson Shotz’s Three Steps Closer Than Infinity, a suite of three lithographs on mirrorized Mylar in custom Plexiglas cases. These works challenge the assumptions of printing techniques and the kind of surfaces and forms that we consider printable.
The last works that I want to highlight are Wanda Ewing’s faux magazine covers for an African-American beauty magazine entitled Bougie (January 2007 and June 2007), reductive linocuts with acetate and vinyl lettering; Ethan Green’s Charlie Rose, seven screenprints on six stacked Plexiglas sheets; Noah Breuer’s T.O.W System and Gunner, offset lithographs published by the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies at Columbia University; and John Lee’s woodcut silhouettes of characters from the television cartoon Family Guy entitled F0701 and F0702. These works, in the great tradition of pop art, all mine current events and pop culture to create immediate impressions and interpretations of what is happening around us. This is truly what printing can offer us – a window into our own world that is fast, reproducible and democratic.
Brett Littman is the Executive Director of The Drawing Center in SoHo, New York; host of Material Culture, a radio program broadcast on www.wps1.org; and is an active art and design critic.
© International Print Center New York, 2008. |
|
|
Monday though Friday
