{"id":47423,"date":"2019-09-24T10:21:39","date_gmt":"2019-09-24T16:21:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=47423"},"modified":"2023-11-13T13:55:34","modified_gmt":"2023-11-13T19:55:34","slug":"poiesis-sail-away-art-of-three-dimensional-prints-at-art-access-gallery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/poiesis-sail-away-art-of-three-dimensional-prints-at-art-access-gallery\/","title":{"rendered":"Poiesis: Sail-Away Art of Three-Dimensional Prints, at Art Access Gallery"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Detail of Brenda Mallory’s “Rifts #4,” collagraph print on Rives BFK, thread<\/p><\/div>\n

What are prints? In a way, they\u2019re coinage: capable of being drawn, or pulled, as printmakers say, from a belabored crucially important original art surface, in potentially endless number.<\/h4>\n

Unlike coins, a print has a stated and limited run.<\/h4>\n

And a good printmaker does an almost horrific thing \u2014 eventually (preferably fairly quickly so there is no turning back) destroying the original mold, or matrix. “14\/15” scrawled at the bottom of that print says it is fourteenth of only fifteen possible prints. Horrific, if you believe that the worked area which the print is drawn from is the true-art native home, or lodestone, of the work: those incised marks in wood, or copper, or drawings in grease crayon on stone, are the precious seed, the mother-crown from which copies are made, prints its salable derivative, that sale price increased by the limitedness of the run of prints, the destruction of its source.<\/h4>\n
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Ike Bushman, “Spiritism II,” wire, lithography on Japanese paper<\/p><\/div>\n

It is perhaps helpful for the artist to move on to another project, as an explorer would less want to return if a dock he had carefully built was now in ruins. He\u2019d build a new dock elsewhere.<\/h4>\n

Poiesis<\/em>, an exhibition at Art Access set up for The Rocky Mountain Print Alliance symposium coming to Salt Lake City in October, features works which have leapt to something three-dimensional from something flat and two-dimensional (Poiesis meaning changing to something else). And there\u2019s a whole bunch of dock-building going on here, explorations of what you can do with a print: look at Ike Bushman\u2019s \u201cSpiritism I” and “Spiritism II,\u201d mobiles that appear almost like ships in the air, made from Bushman\u2019s lithographs on Japanese paper, formed and joined by wire. Or Chinn Wang\u2019s \u201cAlbum\u201d pieces, which are like surprise windows, as Amber Heaton\u2019s tangerine and raspberry woodcut squares of \u201cSpirtum\u201d are like very bold floor tiles.<\/h4>\n

Kathryn Maxwell\u2019s \u201cUnraveling the Secrets,\u201d made up of 180 spools of vivid, heavy twine unraveling, seems symbolic more of printmakers getting to work than the suggested unrolling of secrets. It speaks to the need of artists, printmakers, to do the endless work they do, beginning again and again, setting out for uncharted territory, perennially, industriously, making things; and, increasingly, of using many-colored materials.<\/h4>\n
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Kathryn Maxwell, “Unraveling the Secrets,” spools wrapped with pigment digital-printed paper<\/p><\/div>\n

Printing has taken off to a new realm of possibilities; the centuries of mostly black ink on heavy white or cream-colored paper are long gone. Most richly colored of all here is Paula Wilson\u2019s \u201cIn the Desert Mooning,\u201d a huge piece curved inward like a ship\u2019s scroll-sail. It\u2019s tantalizingly hybrid; made from prints, yet, a drawing or a painting of a carpet, with painted tasseled fringe at top and bottom. In a collection of three-dimensional printwork, expect lots of types of prints \u2014 this one\u2019s \u201ccollagraph on muslin with inkjet on silk, mounted on canvas and wood.\u201d<\/h4>\n
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Stefanie Dykes, \u201cPreparing for the Apocatastasis \u2026 I didn\u2019t say I was ready,\u201d collagraph prints of muslin fabric with thread<\/p><\/div>\n

There\u2019s still a lot of serious black and white and gray here (the argument could be made, as with photographs, or movies, that any color print which is good would also be just as good and admirable, or more so, in black and white). The blankets casually hung from hooks in Stefanie Dykes’ \u201cPreparing for the Apocatastis\u201d are black and white and gray collagraphs (though a few have blue or green underlinings). Brenda Mallory\u2019s \u201cRifts #4,\u201d framed strips of collagraphs stitched by thread, looks almost like carefully pleated birch bark, all black and white and cream; and Ike Bushman\u2019s ships-in-the-sky mobiles are cream and black and gray. Also strictly black and white is Camilla Taylor\u2019s \u201cThe Soil\u201d piece \u2014 a quilt, laid over a stand like a tablecloth, made of delicate intaglio-printed ghostish-gray and white and soot-black fabric. Much of modern art is window-dressing; here, for effect, one black ceramic hollow cast of a man\u2019s lone right hand rests on top of that quiet quilt.<\/h4>\n

That ceramic hand suddenly, bravely displayed here \u2014 on the very somber quilt \u2014 is proof of the art-installation quality of surprise now richly possible in a display of prints, if they have, as these have, through their makers\u2019 efforts, through poisesis<\/em>, made the leap to three-dimensional. Work like this has self-incorporated, too, by its own hand, what an art show really needs to be truly good: not just flat work, but full-round, or three-dimensional work, also. Three-dimensional and flat enhance the magic of each other, just as onions and garlic make meat taste good.<\/h4>\n
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Camilla Taylor, \u201cThe Soil\u201d\u00a0(diptych), drypoint intaglio on found fabric, quilting, ceramic with underglaze<\/p><\/div>\n

Which brings us back to that quandary of the tragically-gone three-dimensional beauty of those hand-carved woodblock or linoleum-block sources for prints; those labor-intent collections of marks of all types in the copper or tin or aluminum; the stones which were grease-pencilled to launch the lithographs. How beautiful they would be, framed and kept, instead of destroyed and thus lost. How many were sacrificed, destroyed, through centuries. To increase the cost of a print? To satisfy the buyer? Over time, the triumphant survivor would be the original, but it\u2019s a land which can\u2019t be returned to. You can\u2019t go home again.<\/h4>\n

You can make a little trip to an imaginary island, though, walking around Joey Behrens\u2019 \u201cyou are not a tree but a vine\u201d and \u201cbetween earth and sky\/a device for meditation.\u201d Made from cyanotypes and monotypes, they are a blue that\u2019s not sky-blue or sea-blue. They\u2019re the blue that\u2019s the stuff of dreams, a tincture, almost, from the glass of blue medicine-bottles. All on one tabletop beneath bright lights, the smallest element looks like a tiny valiant sail-ship heading across the water to the larger uprisen 3-D island continent ahead. Which, lo and behold, is populated and architectural (if you prefer to see it that way, even with a Sydney Opera House). Or, if you prefer, those robust swells which look almost like the giant upthrust ribs of the Sydney opera house are just robust landscape, full of the dramatic dips of mountains and valleys.<\/h4>\n
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Joey Behrens, “between earth and sky\/a device for meditation,” cyanotype and monotype, handmade paper (flax), Canary Island ivy, Adlax seeds<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s all made from prints; this is all good for meditation as you can travel to the island continent via the little print-boat, or, in reverse, you can dream of traveling away from the island continent by looking out at the little print-boat. This print-island-continent might be a sort of Australia, long before or long after a soul lived there, one bright day in its happiest harbor. Pre-colonial or post-colonial. It\u2019s an old little-boy\u2019s reverie: the paper hat, the paper boat, the lake. On that blue island of your dreams why, you\u2019ll even make the coins, with your name signing all of them. You\u2019ll run the bank. It\u2019s for the best recurring meditation possible: you\u2019re imagining that country or kingdom is yours. You\u2019ll rule.<\/h4>\n

Poiesis<\/em>, a group show curated by Stefanie Dykes, Art Access Gallery, Salt Lake City, through Oct. 11.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What are prints? In a way, they\u2019re coinage: capable of being drawn, or pulled, as printmakers say, from a belabored crucially important original art surface, in potentially endless number. Unlike coins, a print has a stated and limited run. And a good printmaker does an almost horrific thing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1568,"featured_media":47449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,14],"tags":[461,747,3521,165,3522,3523,195],"class_list":["post-47423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-exhibition_reviews","category-visual_arts","tag-brenda-mallory","tag-camilla-taylor","tag-ike-bushman","tag-joey-behrens","tag-kathryn-maxwell","tag-paula-wilson","tag-stefanie-dykes"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/rifts4.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-27 20:08:35","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1568"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47423"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47423\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70714,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47423\/revisions\/70714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}