Today's image of the art print is somewhat tainted. For better or worse, many artists have turned to commercial printing processes to reproduce their images in multitude in hopes of appealing to a mass market.
But even with all of that, the desire to create hand-pulled prints has remained a fascination for many. Primarily because no other medium can produce the unique aesthetic effects inherent to printmaking. Effects that are astoundingly limitless, given the simple combination of ink on paper.
These hand-pulled prints are completely unlike their mass-market counterparts, which can be found in any mall. They are instead, original works of art. Hand wrought through experimentation, trial and error.
Fortunately, Pittsburgh has a place for artists interested in exploring the possibilities of printmaking known as Artists Image Resource, a fine art printmaking facility and exhibition space on the North Side.
Each year, since its inception in the mid 1990s, this nonprofit organization has invited four to seven artists of varying disciplines to develop their own print projects.
"What we do is we bring the artists in and really just let them run amuck," says Robert Beckman, director and co-founder of Artists Image Resource.
At the end of the year, they mount an annual "Projects Exhibitions," which showcases the resultant print works of each invited artist. This year's exhibition features the work of sculptor Roger Laib, painters Susanne Slavick and Michael Morrill, and Mary Martin, an artist who works in ceramics, collage and glass.
Perhaps Laib's work emphasizes the interdisciplinary activities that occur at the print studio best. An artist who works with found objects, Laib began working at Artists Image Resource over the summer by scanning various objects on a flatbed scanner. By the fall, he was busy filling the back gallery of the second-floor exhibition space with large-scale constructions made of scrap wood and various found objects such as a bicycle, tricycle, vacuum cleaner, shutters, whirligigs and a golf bag.
By combining silk screens made from the earlier scanned objects and silk screens made from photographs Laib took of his constructions, he made nearly 60 silk-screen prints. Many of which line the walls of the very gallery that houses the constructions for a most interesting and interactive installation piece that can only be described as a beautiful mess.
In the hallway gallery next to Laib's installation, Martin displays several silkscreen prints that also feature combined materials. Similar to her usual works, which usually take the form of collages, Martin has combined various inks, some metallic, to produce uniquely colorful versions of her African inspired collages.
Opposite those, five more works by Martin show further exploration with the silkscreen printing process.
For that suite of works, titled "Description of the Undescribable," which illustrate a poem of the same title by Martin's husband, poet and spoken word artist Luqman Abdul Salaam, Martin combined images of the hands of her son and husband with text from the poem, scanned stitching, pieces of papyrus and images derived from African textiles to create evocative works that underscore the poem as it relates to fatherhood and spiritual connections.
In a large gallery next to Martin's work, Slavick has mounted three sets of six prints each that exemplify the kind of combinations that can result from expansive thinking about the hands on processes of printmaking.
For the prints, Slavick chose the work of one of printmaking's earliest and foremost practitioners, Albrecht Durer, as a starting point when beginning her unique suite of prints she calls "(Re) setting sites."
Basically images of pillows upon pillows, Slavick chose to screen print different drawings of pillows by Durer onto actual pillow casings, stuff and photograph them and then make screen prints of those combined images.
The pillows are further enhanced by the placement of reticles — the crosshairs from riflescopes — which Slavick printed on the plexiglass that fronts the framed works. She even went so far as to imbed one of the sheets of plexiglass with a bullet that hovers in front of one of the prints.
This kind of involved combination is very much exemplary of the printmaking vernacular at the moment, which is no surprise given that Slavick, who is the chairman of the school of art at Carnegie Mellon University, is heavily involved in making and exhibiting her art on an international level.
Likewise, Morrill, who also is a well-exhibited painter and, coincidentally, the chairman of the art department at the University of Pittsburgh, also has made several prints that are representative of that vernacular.
Basically four suites of prints each printed in four processes — etching, lithography, screen printing and IRIS (or digital printing) — Morrill, who was the first artist to begin working on prints at Artists Image Resource this year, has made full use of the different presses and processes the facility has to offer.
Although all of the prints are abstract, they are broken down into four categories: landscape, architecture, sky and Vermont — all of which began as photographs of abstractions found in nature.
Being that these natural abstractions also are inspirations for Morrill's large-scale abstract paintings, the artists wisely chose to include one of his paintings in the upper gallery where the prints are on display.
From Laib's elaborately constructed installation piece to Morrill's integrated display, one easily gets the sense of the interdisciplinary and exploratory types of works encouraged at Artists Image Resource.
"The artist's projects are the core of everything," Beckman says. "The dynamic of the studio comes from that."
| '7th Annual Projects Exhibition: Roger Laib, Mary Martin, Michael Morrill, Susanne Slavick' |
