Printin’ Artwork & Statements

Janet Ballweg

Statement:
This work is about constructions of memory and experience. I use domestic imagery to focus on familial relationships and the creation of stories that address dualistic issues such as power/vulnerability, private/shared space, and presence/absence. They are presented as narratives, embedded within a larger iconic image, to contextualize the narrative while simultaneously pushing it into the background, rendering the story or experience partially invisible. These narratives are meant to be hyperreal - fragments of truth intertwined with fiction - as a means to address the psychological weight of experience and the sense of a collective memory. In the end, I want the viewer to have a vague recognition of this lingering moment.

Zoe Couvillion

Statement:
I am currently making lithographs that include relief-print detailing; the images drawn and embossed therein explore ties between people, their objects, and their spaces, and what role repeated rituals and actions play in the connection between them all. These prints exist as two-dimensional, easily shared-and- transported metaphors for the relationships between owned-objects, people, and their environments. They also beg what becomes of these variables when one or more of the three is missing.
Stone lithography provides for an unmatched variety of mark-making without sacrificing tonality and richness. In using this medium with a back-and- forth attitude toward realism and abstraction, I am showcasing my own hand in the ties between my subject-matter and myself, and effectively rendering each piece a self-exploration enveloped in larger searching. Having physical embossment from relief blocks as a compliment to more detailed lithography works as a very physical metaphor for absence and, effectively, literal lasting impression after loss.
Beyond the physical elements these printmaking methods afford my current practice, their historical background provides concept to the very action of making my work. With each edition I pull, I am going through traditional motions and building on actions repeated for centuries by makers and artists I never had the chance to know. In using stones passed down through centuries, and building upon relief methods that have been upheld even longer, I am physically manifesting the ties between person, print object, matrix, and the spaces my work will come to exist in.

Andrew DeCaen

Statement:
These works explore curiosity, tension, longing, and wonder. My work explores rituals surrounding food. I am interested in the space, time, and manner in which we eat, prepare, and acquire our meals as metaphors for complex human situations. These recent works seem to reflect the disquiet of our contemporary challenges.

Web site: http://www.andrewdecaen.com

Hannah Duggan

Statement:
Print media is an ephemeral entity; it is fragile, easily discarded and becoming obsolete in the digital age. Current events are similarly quickly replaced and forgotten with the abundance of information and stimuli of mass communication. My process is a dedication to time. Sifting through newspaper articles, books, images from magazines, and other miscellaneous forms of print media to collect images to then paint in a representational manner is time consuming and seemingly redundant. Why should I not just use the original photograph? I believe painting a photograph preserves and elevates the selected image. My paintings serve as a way to memorialize and contemplate past events outside of the usual context of current events and the world at large. Our advancements in technology has worked as a catalyst for the spread and accessibility of information and news. We are exposed to an overwhelming amount of graphic tragedy across the world seemingly without a filter. I want to question how we should process and grieve with all the tragedy, and yet advancements, we see through the news media.

Web site: http://www.hannahduggan.com

Suzy Farren

Statement:
As a writer for my entire career, I focused on my intellectual self to identify the precise words to communicate a concept. My art evokes a very different side of me. When I create a piece, I rely on emotion and intuition. I feel rather than think. I allow myself to be imperfect and spontaneous. I incorporate mistakes into my finished pieces because they are the voice of my subconscious. I am drawn to the raw, the unfinished, the ragged. I relish the physicality of ripping canvases into rectangles onto which I stitch, paint, make marks and glue objects.

Katie Garth

Statement:
My print-based visual artwork explores the solace of routine and monotony in an increasingly frenetic world. Across cyanotypes, risography, video, installation, and other media, I position tedium as a coping mechanism from the persistent chaos and seeming insignificance that pervade our contemporary experience. Accordingly, I visually depict nondescript items like chairs, sweaters, notebooks, and sneakers as sacred vestiges of a shared existence, often paired with confessional writing or found text. These isolated objects and language fragments provoke a sense of enchantment and unease, highlighting the highly constructed nature of consciousness, and destabilizing viewers? sense of the familiar. My goal is to reveal the mysterious potential of the banal, provoking newfound interest in the strangeness of our collective circumstances.

Web site: http://www.katiegarth.com

Jacob Gibson

Statement:
Utilizing depictions of antique objects in order to reference familial relations and the hand-me-down nature of toxic and abusive behaviors, the work serves to salvage these objects from their abjection in an attempt to personally cope with the mental trauma of growing up similarly in a household absent of love. Picket fences and images of flooring allude to the boundaries constructed to protect myself from being hurt. However, these protective barriers are inadequate, leaving the items in the space vulnerable and serving as a metaphor for the need to be distant as well as the desperate yearning to feel cared for. The woven works seek to take two separate experiences or images and combine them resulting in a confusing abstraction. This is an attempt to find clarity and understanding within the traumatic experiences and assess what it means to feel loved despite feeling shameful, inadequate and personally object.

Web site: http://www.jacobtaylorgibson.com

Ruthann Godollei

Statement:
My work critiques the abuses of power. It is informed by concern over inequities, racism, lack of human rights, immigration, environmental decay, gender normativity and sexism. Text and images float in the darkness of the imagination, hover across a print, or emblazon an object, questioning the imbalances of justice. I am appalled by the bad ideas that masquerade as serious policy proposals. By asking viewers to reconsider how continued inequalities have been presented, framed, and rationalized, my prints ask how we have been convinced that what we see is “normal,” but also how we might look at such issues with a different perspective. A dose of absurdist humor balances my sensibilities.

Chauncey Hay

Statement:
I have become increasingly aware of my dependence on cloud storage services, specifically Google Photos, and how I am reintroduced to ?memories? through a wall of thumbnails when I open my phone. My Google Photos library consists of thousands of images and videos I rely on to describe past interactions with spaces, all of which become less distinguished over time. As a contemporary technology company, Google utilizes their algorithms and neural networks to analyze and repackage uploaded data for their users as curated and cataloged moments. This repackaging and overabundance of visual information depreciates relationships to my memories by distorting, abstracting, and undermining contextual details.

Memories, curated by artificial intelligence, speak to an absence in identity, filtering moments that were once significant enough to capture down to their metadata qualities. My artwork investigates the distance created by AI storage and curation. The resulting physical collages utilize these fragments and invent a new space that obscures the photographic beginnings. Place and reference to time are removed, stripping the imagery down to metadata in a similar, factual way that we see with the binary code system. Although the invented space conceals the context, spatial definition, and significance of the source material, it reveals an abstraction that playfully invites the viewer to interpret and navigate the available information much like the organized photos and videos stored within cloud storage services.

Web site: http://www.chaunceyhay.com

Paige Holzbauer

Statement:
I respond and react to personal images of the environment I grew up in, which includes the banks along the Missouri River, the woods beyond my neighborhood, the city blocks of red brick-built houses, and the back alleyways and abandoned lots between them. Drawing from memories of solitary explorations, the active search for objects with attached sentimental values, conversations with people, childhood traumas, and recent physical and emotional changes, I explore through mixed media collage interactions between these interwoven complex ideas. I investigate these deeply personal complex mental spaces through mark-making, painting with my hands, printing various matrices)in different colors, overlaying layers to form asymmetrical compositions, playing with how they are read.
There is also an improvisational alchemistic transformation of materials through the human hand and the act of monoprint. Employing multiple compositional techniques, I use a cross between saturated primary colors with subdued neutrals, rectangular insets and printing patterns to serve as anchor points, ways to block out, or act as a screen, and provide a visual structure or division of space. My line work, is primarily emotional, gestural, playful, and reactions to the concept or current thought that is most present in my mind. Echoes of people reside in in each piece; however, they are unidentifiable. They are silhouettes, iconographic patterns, placeholders for aspects of myself that I wish to explore but do not altogether name. Edges and the white space underneath play a part in these specific pieces; they flatten and define the space, while giving an overall neutral reading, with the linework dancing between the emotional and playful, wistful moments, playing against the sinister undertones which creep in from the edges of the work never too far below the surface.

My experiences have led me to socioeconomic issues that I’m addressing in my other degree—the Masters of Sustainable Environments. Although these issues are still part of my creative research—my fine art work is endeavoring to become more personal, touching on these more macro issues but not directly commenting on them.

Web site: https://www.instagram.com/holtsy_/

Raluca Iancu

Statement:
Just what is it about a car crash that makes it impossible to look away? Is it a case of morbid fascination? An obsession that has as much to do with fear of death as with blatant curiosity? Crashes, of all kinds, are trivialized by their frequent appearances across the spectrum of information mediums. The constant overexposure to images of collisions is desensitizing and leads to a lack of understanding of the damage caused as well as a loss of empathy for the victims. As the comprehension of these events shifts from a mature viewpoint to a childish one, cars and other vehicles become toys for adults rather than machines with serious consequences.

Web site: http://www.ralu.ca

Scott Ludwig

Statement:
Frequently working in collaboration with other artists, my most recent body of work is a series of contemplations on the sociopolitical issues, apathy, malaise, and unyielding intransigence that currently dominates American culture. Social media, politics, advertising, etc. are complicit and seemingly revel in obfuscating the truth. Vacillating between representational and non-representational imagery and often cloaked in a claustrophobic field of 'mashed-up', layered visual matter, the intent is to challenge the viewer to confront, unravel and untangle the visual and conceptual conundrum before their very eyes.

Joseph Lupo

Statement:
My artistic practice explores deconstructionist and postmodern theories of how we understand signifiers and language. Using comics gives me the opportunity to take apart, reorganize, and complicate a cultural artifact that is familiar, knowable, and considered complete. This latest series of prints uses copyright free French comics from the early 1900?s to talk about text as data and the intentional misrepresentation of that data. Although the imagery is absurd, I think this work can begin to raise questions about who has access to data and who has the authority to interpret data. The ambiguity and proximity between the ?authentic? and the ?inauthentic? text is designed to reveal how the presentation of information impacts our trust and understanding of it.

Web site: http://www.josephlupo-portfolio.com/

John McCaughey

Statement:
In my work, I draw inspiration from the distressed buildings and defaced walls of the inner city. I am attracted to these structures for their visual and textural properties, the cracks, chipping paint, poorly removed graffiti and flashy advertisements. I love how cities age, how they evolve? embracing their past while also looking to the future. It is a parallel to how I develop work in the studio. I find beauty in the discarded, juxtaposing old with the new, and blurring lines between organic and manmade. Part of my process involves manipulating made and digitally produced materials to create something that is visually balanced and texturally complex.

The acts of painting, sanding, screen-printing, collage? and decollage? have become ways of developing a mass of colorful and textural diverse collage material that I can quickly layer into my compositions. My in-progress work is often fed into photoshop where I further tinker with the colors and placement while adding effects like gradients, pixilation, and overlays. Variations of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black have become common colors in both my two- and three-dimensional work. This color scheme references how computers make sense of and depict our world.

I draw inspiration from the mid-twentieth century greats such as Villege?, Warhol, Richter, Twombly and Rauschenberg, but my compositions are also heavily influenced by the writings of James Bridle and the New Aesthetic art movement aimed at blurring the line between physical and virtual.

Web site: http://johnmccaugheyart.com

Sarah McDermott

Statement:
My work centers on issues of power and space, investigating relationships of
dominance between different groups of people, and between people and their
environment. I look at the ways that people attempt to create order, with varying
degrees of permanence, by manipulating and defining the built environment, and how these human geographies manifest in our psychology and embodiment.

Web site: http://www.thekidneypress.com

Nick Mittelstead

Statement:
Traditional academic and artistic explorations into powerful groups and ideologies seem insufficient. It is becoming increasingly difficult to see, understand, and critique those that wield power as they blend together to obfuscate their more abnormal qualities. My work seeks to fill a perceived gap between academia?s identification of cultural issues and Art?s making those issues feel real, present, and imperative.

This gap is exploited by cultural pillars. It is not uncommon that contemporary artists mirror corporate risk management techniques in their use of bodies ? not their own ? for dangerous performance art. Nor is it infrequent that museum boards are overpopulated by executives pursuing charity?s social clout or by regressive government institutions bent on steering cultural dialogue. One cannot watch television without corporate entities over-publicizing insincere endorsements of socially progressive causes. The prismatic morals at play in our cultural moment are deeply anxiety producing. A traditional research methodology would identify these cultural issues and a very material-centric art practice would make them real. My work aspires to do both so we may better address our contemporary moment.

Web site: http://nickmittelstead.com

Roxanne Phillips

Statement:
I am a printmaker. I create original hand pulled prints that often have social justice concepts.

Web site: http://roxannephillips.com

Amy Firestone Rosen

Statement:
The idea of using clothing goes back to when I was a child. I loved cutting out paper dolls and with my mother’s encouragement, I created my own paper doll clothing. As I was exploring printmaking I thought I could use repurposed clothing items as my plate. I loved how the press captured the image of the clothing. For the slip series, I found that I was drawn to the patterns and layers that I could not duplicate with other mediums. The power of the press creates images from clothing that captures every detail. The slips have human figurative quality.

Blake Sanders

Statement:
The slow march of cultural progress shares much in common with the evolution of primitive and prehistoric creatures. My work discusses antiquated attitudes ranging from primeval notions of gender roles and romance to the reluctant move from harmful technologies like our fossil fuel dependence. Dinosaurs act as human surrogates in my work to parallel their ancient, and our still archaic, habits while tracing a behavioral lineage between all creatures. My practice is influenced by the ?fossil record? evident in my own artistic development. I also look to print predecessors to gain an understanding of the adaptations in printmaking?s collective evolution.

Web site: http://orangebarrelindustries.com/blake

Marceline Saphian

Statement:
My work is an effort to share with others feelings and responses that are difficult, if not impossible to put into words. Rather than copying nature, I use it to call on inner responses to what I observe. Subject matter is a point of departure rather than a destination. One of my interests at this time is using older work to add overlays of paint and collage. This leads me to new development as an artist, and I find it is a way of melding the past with the present and the future - a way of making time an unending continuum.

Kristin Sarette

Statement:
Through print media, I examine continual growth and transformation. The work tells a formal story of changes and paradigm shifts in the mindscape during intense self-introspection and transformation. I use the chromatic spectrum of yellow blended into its compliment as a metaphor for unclear emotional states. The blending of complimentary colors creates a muddy view of where we find ourselves during these intense periods of change. I strip away any excess mark-making to leave a raw, saturated feeling of change, and an uncertain, but ever present feeling of optimism.
My work stems from the Formalists? use of graphic color and phenomenological underpinnings. Although the artist?s hand and a conceptual notion beyond the objects themselves can be seen, I gravitate towards certain ideas behind Minimalism. Gestalt and preexisting systems, which can be seen in the works of artists like Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, are major influences for my process.
I find relevance in the totality of the aesthetic and non-aesthetic. The process of transformation continues cyclically, with one cycle informing the next. My work represents this infinite progression, the moments within it, and the whole in which these moments become.

Nic Tisdale

Artist Statement: In all my pieces I try to obscure the central figures from historical, contemporary, and propaganda pieces to call attention to the manufactured meanings and messages of the portraits. I distort and glitch the images of figures by inserting the text from social media posts directly into the hexadecimal code of the digital images. All of the text information is derived from online disinformation campaigns of internet trolls targeting US voters. These trolls create fake personas by uploading images, retweeting hashtags, or posting comments that have no seeming connection to their goal. However, these curated data portraits make the propaganda they peddle more palatable to other online users. In this sense, the portraits have an innocuous surface with an underlying subversive presence. My work dissects the relationship between these depicted figures and the coded messages they convey to the viewer.

Web site: http://www.nictisdaleart.com

Tonja Togerson

Statement:
My prints explore the internal and external factors that compose one’s identity. Organs, blood, and bones intertwine with flowers and floriography. I am interested in this collision of nature with the body, and how it creates a difficult beauty and pleasant anxiety. This work reflects on the history of both medical anatomy and botanical illustrations within printmaking, and the tradition of herbalism within medicine.

Web site: http://tonjatorgerson.com

Natalie Tyree

Statement:
Every day we are inundated with messages from our peers and the media. As a result, even the most unwavering individuals can begin to question their own beliefs, identity, and ideals. There?s always a message telling you who you should be, how to act, what to believe; in all of this chaos there?s seldom a time to pause and reflect.

What is your role? Are you the leader or the follower? Do you contribute to this chaos? In a selfie-obssessed, hypersensitive time, we all begin to question our position, contributions,
and messages. My work examines pop culture ideas and themes and presents them in a manner that allows the viewer to examine their own existence amongst all of this excessive
stimulation of messages and ideals.

Web site: https://ntyree.webflow.io/portfolio

Patrick Vincent

Statement:
I use print and print-based structures to explore myth and narrative in graphic traditions, mixing traditional and contemporary animal-human iconography to survey contemporary social and ecological issues. The animal and human figures signify that we are at once a part of the natural world and apart from it, which necessitates a mediated experience for us to reimagine and question our role in the natural world.

Web site: http://www.twinbeepress.com

Brandon Williams

Statement:
My prints are meticulous and technical; this tight precision encourages the viewer to look closely. They are primarily black and white. The lack of color allows graphic content to be dominant. The imagery is composed of complex, impossible interiors with a strong perspective foundation and traditional approach. Visually, they are dark in tone, filled with organic textures, and geometric patterns. The spaces are abandoned, empty, forgotten rooms that are devoid of life. The elements have deteriorated these areas, making them confusing and mysterious, yet inviting at the same time. They do not exist, and they cannot exist in any time period.

For inspiration, I look to my current surroundings. I am inspired by abandoned areas and the history within them. I am interested in time and how it visually affects locations. Creating an atmosphere that emphasizes the forgotten past of a place while capturing the complexity and beauty of its current decay is a major theme in my work. I have been intrigued by the many nearby random misplaced and deserted homes and buildings. They are in the middle of nowhere with no signs of hope. I find their vacancy, narrative and presence fascinating. Each of them are unique and diverse, but they share similar qualities. Conceptually, they are self-reflections. The prints are direct reactions to my personal environment. Isolation, disorientation, and the unknown can lead to feeling emotions of loneliness, depression, and anxiousness. Ideas of change and conflict are key components in the work.

Web site: http://brandonwilliamsart.com

Eric Wilson

Statement:
I was hooked on Americana, addicted to kitsch, early on. When my dad would watch westerns on TV or take me exploring in antique stores I would float away into daydreams. Overwhelmed, I imagined the past lives I might have lived (I still am on the edge of understanding this avenue of reincarnation). These dreams were condensed versions of the most potent Americana ideals; saturated in a world of red white, and blue, cowboys and Indians, and anti-modernism, and sheltered in buildings constructed in the likenesses of food, fireworks, and Animals.

I could never scrub these vivid images of America from my childhood from the wrinkles of my brain. My work is a way of exercising this alternate reality from my mind. I share these Kodochromatic images of American mythology to question the consequences of history.

Web site: http://www.ericwilson.us

Erin Wohletz

Statement: 

I make work about my experience with nonbinary queerness. These prints are made utilizing the traditional materials, processes, and language of naturalist prints. Naturalist prints were created as images of scientific study. Animals and plants were drawn in order to define and gain understanding of their nature. However, instead of animal or botanical specimens the analyzed subject is a page. Within this page important language, marks relationships and symbols are laid out for analysis. 

Sketchbooks, notebooks, and diary pages are spaces for argument and discovery. Problems are worked out before finalized. I?m interested in this transitory argumentative space. Notepads catch subliminal thoughts because you're not fully paying attention. How do we formulate our ideas? This private page is a place for unedited thought. A page has two faces. I allow the viewer to see one. My self discovery of queerness has come through a lot of internal struggle and argument. A private back and forth argument. In my current body of work I allow the viewer into my private analytical space. 

Symbolism has a deep tradition within queer history. Often double coded it allowed and continues to allow members of the community to communicate to the in crowd while also eluding would be persecutors. I am consistently intrigued by subtext and nonverbal communication. In the same way that scientific prints were used for education, I seek to educate the viewer on LGBTQ+ history and the nature of non-binary feeling. 

Trying to understand my own queerness has involved a lot of categorizing of information and symbols. It?s almost like I have an internal pros/cons list going but instead its a gay/straight list. I couldn?t help but try and place both sides on a scale and try to figure out which side seemed heavier. I?m interested in putting the viewer in a similar analytical space. Trying to decipher moments and symbols to find meaning. I think this was the intrinsic feeling to my discovery of my own queerness. Discovering symbols and then the lightbulb went off. 

Web site: http://ewohletz.com

Alex Younger

Statement:
My work focuses on the systems and structures that maintain and support sexual violence. I examine the historical traumas and violent bureaucracy that underpin our cultural handling of sexual violence, using the inherent properties of my research, materials, and processes to achieve poetics through didacticism. Using legal documents, press statements, and composed political declarations as primary source material and visual compositions, I strip the language of its artifice of impartiality. These pieces bear witness to traumatic histories, using haptic surfaces and display to highlight the gulf between the literal representation of the object and the pain they signify, but can only indirectly portray.

Web site: http://www.ayoungerartist.com