Please join us for a reception for the artists from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, May 14. The exhibition is co-curated by John Gilvey and Jennifer Mackiewicz and features selected emerging and established artists that [...]]]> The Wassaic Project
May 14 to June 19, 2011
Hudson Beach Glass Beacon, 162 Main St., Beacon, NY

Please join us for a reception for the artists from 6 to 9 p.m. Saturday, May 14.
The exhibition is co-curated by John Gilvey and Jennifer Mackiewicz and features selected emerging and established artists that are participating in the Wassaic Project's artist residency program.

About the Wassaic Project
The Wassaic Project is an artist-run, multidisciplinary arts organization founded by Bowie Zunino, Eve Biddle, and Elan Bogarin, finding home in a refurbished grain mill in Wassaic, NY. In the summer of 2008, this picturesque little hamlet became the site of a week-long arts festival with the mill serving as venue for 40 artists, 15 musicians and 500 visitors. Riding on the success of their previous year, the 2009 festival hosted 100 artists and 2500 visitors. Jeff Barnett-Winsby joined as co-director in 2008.

Participating Artists:
Ben Bigelow, Disorientalism, Ghost of a Dream, Janine Iverson, Karl LaRocca, Amanda Lechner, Corina Reynolds, Sarah Nicole Phillips, Tomie Seo, Amanda Tiller, Breanne Trammell, Brindalyn Webster, Leah Wolff and Jing Yu.

John Gilvey is a partner in Hudson Beach Glass and glass artist. Jennifer Mackiewicz is an independent arts consultant and curator living in Beacon. She recently curated the show “small” at Hudson Beach Gallery.

For more information on the Wassaic Project, the festival and residency opportunities, please visit their website at www.wassaicproject.org.
http://www.hudsonbeachglass.com/calendar.html#banner2

Artists in DEEP/SHALLOW have created artwork in response to GSS library references which have already been used as visual resources for other artists. The appropriation of these resources forces a continuity (which normally occurs organically and over time) across disciplines, content and processes.

INSTALLATION/PERFORMANCE BY ROB ANDREWS

OPENING EVENT [...]]]>

Artists in DEEP/SHALLOW have created artwork in response to GSS library references which have already been used as visual resources for other artists. The appropriation of these resources forces a continuity (which normally occurs organically and over time) across disciplines, content and processes.

INSTALLATION/PERFORMANCE BY ROB ANDREWS

OPENING EVENT APRIL 29TH 7:00PM – 10:00PM

http://gowanusstudio.org/wp/

The Library collects published references recommended by artists in The Gowanus Studio Space’s immediate and greater community; to compile a physical and online database of pamphlets, manuals, exhibition catalogs, books, newspapers, magazines, etc. which have visually influenced artists.

The Gowanus Studio Space and EyelevelBQE Gallery have collaborated on partner exhibitions at their Brooklyn spaces to activate and launch this new project. Exhibiting artists in High/Low deal with ideas surrounding libraries and shelving, while artwork in Deep/Shallow responds to sources in the Library’s collection.

Here’s part of the press release for the show:

“In response to an invitation to [...]]]>

The opening for Amze Emmon’s Refugee Reading Room at Space 1026 in Philadelphia was big fun. Lots of folks showed up and ravaged the installation like a swarm of locusts. I picked up a few goodies myself.

Here’s part of the press release for the show:

“In response to an invitation to exhibit at Space 1026, I (Amze Emmons) proposed an exhibition in which a post utopian installation would serve as a distribution point for free publications by a host of other artists, designers, cartoonists and illustrators. After months of planning that project is about to become real….

…This exhibition will transform the gallery space, sparking new relationships between creators and audience, and that this will lead to a range of interesting interdisciplinary connections within an experimental gift economy. This arrangement is obviously informed by my own aesthetic, but I think the conceptual connections between print, community, and utopian experiments are made stronger when put in conversation with architectural phenomena and notions of displacement.”

Amze Emmons February 4th – 25th, 2011 Opening Reception: Friday, February 4th, 7-11

With Special Guests:

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 [...]]]> by: Michelle Levy
January 2011
© International Print Center New York
download pdf here.

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.

Phases of a Peanut Butter Cup Wrapper 2010 relief prints of peanut butter cup wrappers edition size: 2 4.5″ x 19″ $390 framed