by: Michelle Levy
January 2011
© International Print Center New York
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When an artist makes a print, he or she takes part in a time-honored legacy,
the communal spirit of printmaking. New Prints 2011/ Winter illustrates this spirit
with a snapshot of anomalous and compelling print projects. It presents a medley of work
combining the darkly humorous, the socially aware, the technically masterful, the bizarre,
and the inventively crafted. It emphasizes the individuality and multifarious forms that
naturally sprout up out of the print medium.

Printmaking is unique in that it is directly connected to the spread of culture.
Images and ideas could only be disseminated once they could be printed. It is therefore a
practical medium, tied to technology. Beyond its accessibility, printmaking is about process,
about the deliberate filtering and impressing of an image. Information evolves from its
original form once it is transposed to a matrix and printed and changes again when it is
dispersed from the “one” to the “many.”

One nod to the print legacy is its allegiance to the underdog— the discerning
artist/observer provides cultural parody that blurs the lines of high and low-brow. There
is a tradition of witty illustration of the controversial, farcical and bawdy. Blake Sanders’
apocalyptic vision, British (Petroleum) Invasion, is a comedic, dark image of a black oil
ocean carrying a struggling fleet of sailing ships, comparing our colonial past to the
calamitous present; Kit Boyce’s Oh, is a Tim Burton-ish depiction of a depressed, worn
and ragged cityscape. More light-hearted is the inane After the Gym There is a Secret Tea
Party No One Talks About, Peter Kingstone and Daryl Vocat’s comical scenario of a group
of men in their birthday suits showing off their wares.

Another powerful tool for parody in printmaking is image sampling. Channeling
middle-American youth culture, Glen Baldridge’s stenciled sheets of handmade paper
depict pulpy psychedelic drug horror movie posters: Shrooms (2007) Get Ready to Get
Wasted and The Tripper (2006) On 4.20, Hippie Blood Will Trickle Down. It is hard not to
laugh along with the artist. Baldridge likely came to treasure these images for their
campiness, outright humor, or nostalgic value, then ritualized his veneration by
transforming them into precious art objects that hang on very different walls than the
original posters.

Jing Yu commits a riotous act of appropriation: her very own Catalogue Raisonné.
Graced with a cheeky cover depicting the artist surrounded by roses, the book consists of
line-drawn mimeographs—an outmoded technology the artist used to painstakingly
reproduce her existing body of work—the comical and endearing result is a parody of self
and art world values.

The connection to commercial reproduction, printed labels, signage, posters and
patterns naturally links printmaking to the everyday. Sarah Nicole Phillips’ Curbside Object
Status Tag is intended to be attached to items left out for trash. This politely designed tag
contains check boxes such as “has no defects and functions perfectly; is broken but has
valuable parts; is infested with creatures” along with space for notes. These tags are playful,
yet send a message, challenging us to rise to the role of dutiful citizen and waste not.
With the many technical nuances employed, printmakers are often drawn beyond
image to the physical process as a subject. Deborah Chaney’s Fresco 2, consists of the
“rainbow roll,” a process where a large roller contains different shades of ink that blend
together to create an illusion of atmosphere as a backdrop to an image. Chaney uses this
as a stand-alone technique, pushing the interplay of color shifts to the extreme. More
visceral– violent even– are Carla Aspenberg’s textural print of shards of shattered glass
embossed into the paper almost to the extent of tearing; Michael Bisbee’s worn and beaten
object described as “shotgun blasted/imprinted oil and dirt on paper;” and Leslie
Grossman’s pyrograph transfer, where a mesh-like form has been singed into the paper.
Printmaking’s proclivity towards layering planes of color, shape and shade lend
it to ventures in pattern and abstraction. Shaun O’Dell’s Ringing out of, Leaping out of
Light is a complex composition of geometric shapes created by lines and flat color planes
that form an imaginary aerial map or architectural plan. Noah Breuer summons the
political, using layer and pattern conceptually to reference camouflage— on a closer look,
our attention is drawn to the evocative image and text that has been partially obscured by
abstract design.

Whether representational or abstract, there is an unmatchable quality in the
physical appearance of the hand-pulled print that attracts artists: in the characteristics of
the ink, the plate tone, the bite of the line. The delicately rendered can break into boldly
graphic, such as in Elizabeth’s Sommerville’s Abyss lithograph depicting a rough ocean
hitting against craggy rocks, or Vera Lutter’s mesmerizing photogravure, Chephren and
Cheops Pyramids, Giza January 28, 2010, that suggests something hauntingly
extraterrestrial.

On the flip-side, these qualities may give rise to quirky, oddly-defined spaces, such
as William Howard’s atmospheric and simplistic depiction of corn; and Yunmee Kyong’s
mysterious broken up and washy ethnological narrative, Were are. And Dennis Olsen’s wild
patterned and deformed head illustrates a natural space within printmaking that allows the
bizarre to give way to the grotesque.

Through all of this, there is virtuosity. Some prints require such mastery of skill,
they leave us mystified. All of the prints in this show are certainly virtuosic; the reductive
relief prints of Erik Hougen and Goedele Peeters are of particular note. Each of the
images is deceptively simple: a man and a bowl, yet these artists conquer a tricky process,
where the same block is used repeatedly; printed then cut away and printed again.
Exploiting many of the above attributes to break off into three dimensional
space, Tai Hwa Goh creates other-worldly installations of strange flowery environments,
built from layered, delicate cut-out intaglio prints of images and lacey patterns. Forms
that appear as clouds, water, mountains, cliffs, grow up and down the wall like ivy, and are
inhabited by lively vegetation, undergrowth, and spontaneously sprouting and emitting
creatures and insects.

As a former manager of the New Prints Program, it was an honor to be invited
back to participate as a Selections Committee Member for this show, and to have the
chance to contribute both as an insider and an outsider along with such distinguished
company. This essay is by no means comprehensive. It only touches upon a portion of the
remarkable work in the show. Perhaps, though, it plants a seed that reminds us to look
beyond face value, taking a moment longer to consider each work’s significance as a
printed object.