Exhibit explores methods of printmaking

FAYETTEVILLE — The current exhibition 50 Places, featured in the hallway of the University of Arkansas Fine Arts Center, represents 100 of the most respected and prominent printmakers/educators working in all 50 states.

It’s part of a portfolio exchange that Melanie Yazzie began organizing in December of 2010. Artists were invited to produce a print based on the particular state they were assigned. Some of the artists happen to be from the chosen state; others did research about that state and made a print. The project was completed in November of 2011.

When we think of printmaking, the mind undoubtedly conjures up images of everything from 16th century engravings of Albrecht Durer to the pop imagery of Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg that dominated the 1960s. Printmaking has evolved from its early role as a readily accessible and affordable means of communication for the public to the breakthroughs of the 20th century that placed prints, alongside sculpture and painting, as a primary means of visual expression.

The techniques and tools now employed in printmaking have become so wide and so diverse that trying to define current printmaking practices under any formal guideline carries with it limited connotations.

Digital media has spawned a host of new approaches for fine art printmaking. Traditional techniques have been superseded, altered (and sometimes facilitated) by the photocopier or the inkjet printer. Melissa

Harshman’s image of what seems to be taken from the archives of Good Housekeeping circa 1965, seamlessly co-opts these tools of the present and the past. Much of Harshman’s source material comes from flea markets, antique stores and old photographs from books and popular magazines. These found images are scanned into the computer, where she can then manipulate color and overlay transparencies, patterns and textures. Afterwards the image can be printed out on paper where it becomes the basis for more traditional hands on printmaking techniques. The result is something more graphically oriented and playfully nostalgic.

Heather Byant takes a more fanciful play on nostalgia in her piece entitled “Virginia” by offering up imagery from fables and the metaphorical use of animals, all through the process of hand-drawn lithography. By drawing directly on the litho stone with grease crayon, there’s a certain physicality contained in the printed image, an appeal to the viewer’s senses that lends itself so well to the storybook imagery being depicted.

Artists are continuing to explore the untapped potential of more traditional methods, such as serigraphy or screen-printing. Louisiana artist Blake Sanders’ screen print entitled “Bring on the Gimp” is a satirical cartoon that touches on a much darker reality that is currently threatening the ecological state of this country. An adjunct professor of printmaking at Tulane  University in New Orleans, Sanders has witnessed first hand the ravaging effects that environmental and chemical disasters have had on the fragile ecosystem of the Louisiana wet lands.

Curtis William Readel illustrates the environmental dangers that face an unrestrained and unchecked consumer-based society in his print entitled “Future Map of the United States.” In what first appears to be a traditional old world map of the United States is a view of the United States if the polar ice caps continue to melt, raising the sea level to 650 feet. At this level, the area in and around Little Rock would become a seaport community.

The 50 States exhibition continues through Aug. 10. Summer hours at the fine arts center are Tuesday through Friday, from noon until 4 p.m. More information is available by calling (479) 575-5202.

A Place Called Home
At the Arts Center of the Ozarks in Springdale, the overall ambiance of Megan Chapman and Stewart Bremner’s joint exhibition —  A Place Called Home — is one of calm and quiet neutrality.

Small white panels are evenly spaced along the gray gallery walls in a way that compliments their similarities in tone and color and imbues each piece with an identity and breathable space all to its own.

Chapman, from Fayetteville, and Bremner, of Scotland, set out to produce a body of paintings that would both embody a perceptual response to the similarities they found in their native homelands while highlighting the physical differences found in their working methods.

As the visitor scans the room, there is an immediate reaction to color, or lack of it. Layers of cool white transparent paint serve a dual purpose in creating both an atmospheric sensation of haze as well as a structural tool for framing isolated drips and patches of color. Balanced horizontals, sweeping arches and strong verticals,serve as structural devices that bring to mind the infinite depth of the skyline while continually referring the viewer back to the square, back to the flatness of the panel.

There are two specific paintings I felt exemplified the theme of the show: The remnants of fleeting light casting its ominous glow against the frigid, icy, pale blue sky in “A Word About Quiet” and “Uncharted Territory,” which gives viewers an aerial, topographical view of the green earth below enveloped in a dominate white vapor.

The titles of the work featured in this exhibit all seem to share in this feeling of loss, isolation and wonderment. “My Land is a Ghost,” “The Equation of Travel,” “Hideaway,” and “The Unknown Variable” all bring to mind peaceful solitude or the sense of self discovery one encounters in a strange new land.

While the theme of this show and installation of the work are all visually successful, I was left questioning the duality of the specific roles each artist played in the show’s creation. One sees the visual manifestation of two painters merged together to create something new, but maybe it’s through this process of merging that one loses a bit of the individual identity of Chapman and Bremner. The viewer is left instead with a body work that results in a cross-breeding of styles and techniques that becomes something more akin to Chapmner.

A Place Called Home runs through Friday (July 27) at ACO. Call (479) 751-5441 for hours.