Installation view of “Beyond Convetion” at Utah Cultural Celebration Center with, from left, work by Nancy Steele-Makasci, Erik Brunvand, Orange Barrel Industries, and The Amazing Hancock Brothers.

Artists in Salt Lake City should be familiar with Utah’s sophisticated, local print community. The Saltgrass collective, for example, not only promotes the highest standards of the art, but brings guest artists in from across the global printmaking community. What may be less known, at least to non-specialists, are the many print shops strung out like so many beads along the historical spine of our state. Weber, U of U, BYU, and UVU each have boasted well-known print artists and instructors. Even bucolic Snow College has a printshop many larger schools might well envy. Beyond Convention: Pushing the Boundaries of Printmaking brings 15 artists with connections to Adam Larsen and his program at Snow to the Utah Cultural Celebration Center (UCCC) in West Valley City, the intention being to demonstrate how printing, no less than any other 21st century art form, has evolved in ways Albrecht Dürer, one of the artists who as much as invented printmaking around 1500, would scarcely recognize today.

Erik Brunvand, “Tube Screamer”

For one world-changing example, the digital revolution transforming our lives is made possible largely by the computer industry’s ability to create ever-smaller integrated circuits, a process rooted in photographic printing technology. The cell phones our readers are almost certainly carrying, and may even be reading these words on, have at their cores invisibly tiny, hugely complex circuits printed on silica wafers. Playful, but also serious acknowledgement of this can be found in a couple of prints that U of U computer architecture professor Erik Brunvand has contributed to Beyond Convention, which will occupy the Pilar Pobil Gallery at UCCC till the end of the year. “Anotata” and “Tube Screamer” are unique in their combining studio printed circuits and real electronic components, each contributing graphic elements like their silhouettes, copper wires, and conductive imagery that mimic the way the wires we might still see in our devices interconnect with the printed components we don’t see. “Tube Screamer” includes an audience-interactive feature that allows a viewer to use a wire to close a circuit and produce the title sound, then change its pitch and volume by moving the contact around the printed portion. Shades of those Dr. Surgery games now being updated with “brain surgeon” and “veterinarian” versions.

There are 15 artists in the exhibition. Each has produced laudable printing before, but if it weren’t for the exhibition title, a viewer might not realize that what their 30 or so works have in common is having been based on the printed image. Characteristic of these innovative approaches is that there is so much more art present, so much more for the viewer to suss out and contemplate. Compelling innovator K Stevens’ “Uncertainty is Still More Beautiful” contains a text by 1996 Nobel Prize-winning poet Wisława Szymborska that is printed on 365 successive squares of silk, a project that challenges the gallery to mount it and the audience to take it in. The artist has experimented with how to show such a large work, extemporaneously trying it on the floor as well as draped, as it’s seen here. I often wonder if viewers are supposed to read texts presented in challenging visual contexts, but here the answer is obvious: the poet’s work is readily available, in the original Polish and splendid translations.

Printing on fabric seems to encourage large scale works like Stevens’. Compared to paper, especially when in a frame and under glass, fabric liberates the size, overall shape, and lively behavior of the finished product while adding richly textured surfaces. We’re far less removed, much more in their presence as they invoke such traditional textiles as tapestries—such as Orange Barrel Industries’ “Two Drained,” the Amazing Hancock Brothers untitled street art, and Blake Sanders’ “Rewind”—but also flags, banners, and even the possibility of a blanket hung on a fence. In the case of Stefanie Dykes’ “Memories of an Ancient Sea,” which began as printed plastic bags full of water that were placed on the bed of a certain dry Lake, printed cloth images of that parched and cracked soil laid on the floor recall the original installation the same way other images invoke the disappearing grandeur of the natural world.

Nancy Steele-Makasci, “The Special Senses”

Stefanie Dykes, “Memories of an Ancient Sea”

Not that paper can’t still contribute to the impact of what’s printed on it. Nancy Steele-Makasci’s “Silenced Again and Again and Again” brings the repetitious designs, utility, and even the disposability of wallpaper to mind as metaphors for the distortions women continue to experience, including Eve taking the blame in the Garden of Eden and Marie Antoinette being blamed for saying something printed 24 years before she could have said it. Because “Silenced Again,” with its memory-like repetitions and variations, is hung in strips on the wall, it comes to life in the breezes caused by passing viewers and the gallery’s powerful HVAC system.

Artistic brilliance doesn’t often run in families, but Abe and Wayne Kimball make a most noteworthy exception as they never fail to charm the viewer’s eye and mind. Son Abe’s “Curmudgeon and Equerry” assembles eight separate lithographs into a bravura image of a geezer, his dog, and their farm. Cutting a single image into eight parts could never match the impact of separately created segments that come together to make their point, and the image that results is life-sized and has substantial presence. “Red with Equipage” similarly captures an important historical moment without interference from sentimental nostalgia. It’s moment, when “a carriage and horses with attendants”—the early meaning of “equipage”—became mechanized reveals how the charm of the days of horse and buggy survived, at least for a while, in what we may know today to be the curse of the automobile.

Wayne Kimball, “Birdbox on a Spindle”

Father Wayne’s “Doubledoor Box” and “Birdbox on a Spindle” bring this exploration back to where we began: with the capacity of printing to reproduce images in any scale without altering their details, colors, or usefulness. These two worlds-in-miniature come alive when the doors are opened or the box is rotated to show interior and exterior. There’s an indispensable, inevitable connection between the art of the print and the books, archives, stickers, postcards, files, notebooks, journals, and histories … all the ways we have of remembering what we have seen and known and the even greater trove of what we haven’t seen, but which they help us to imagine.

This selection doesn’t exhaust the many ways technical liberation has expanded the vocabularies of these artists, nor are those omitted here any less worthy. As always, UCCC’s Mike Christensen has done an excellent and necessarily innovative job of mounting so many unconventional, semi-sculptural works, and finally it’s remarkable how so many unforeseen perspectives and procedures are made approachable by a reliance on a long-familiar and most comfortable medium: print.

Blake Sanders, “Leveled”

Beyond Convention: Pushing the Boundaries of Printmaking, Utah Cultural Celebration Center, West Valley City, through Dec. 31

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.