Keynote Speaker
Panel I Printmaking: A System of Language Thursday 9-10:30a.m
Chaired by Mary Hood
Traditional printmaking processes such as woodcut, intaglio and lithography represent the earliest methods of mass visual and written communication and their continuity and purposefulness into the digital age has been steady. The graphic visual language that underpins all printmaking has become a culturally mainstream idiom affecting both fine and commercial printmaking and studio practices. Printmakers occupy that arena between the artist and the super craftsperson where the democracy of communication is counterbalanced by the excellence of skilled creative practice which has given printmaking its’ far reaching culture currency. This panel proposes to discuss the impact or relevancy of all processes as they relate to the graphic identity of printmaking processes, including digital processes, and their interconnectivity as a system of visual language. It is our current watershed in how we, the collective printmaking community, will seek to define ourselves in the next 10, 20, 30 years and how the visual impact of digital technology will seek to incorporate into this system of language. The emphasis is on thinking, seeing and representing graphically. At the same time, symbols and problem-solving images constitute an important element in the development of a graphic language via a thorough initiation and analysis.
This panel proposes to ask the following questions:
1. What is the critical and analytical understanding of the language of applied printmaking processes?
2. How does the specific graphic identity of individual processes define meaning?
3. What are the historical influences that have led us to, or can guide us and we look for methods of incorporating another graphic identity into a well-established system of language?
4. How can the system of mark making within printmaking be related to the system of mark making within systems of written language?
5. How will the language of printmaking be reconsidered with the collaboration of photography?
6. How will the relationship to graphic design be challenged in the next ten years?
Panel II Bird Prints Thursday 9-10:30a.m
Chaired by Patrick O’Connor
As a genre, avian imagery has maintained a very special place amongst artist printmakers. Birds as a symbol have re-emerged over and over again in a way that is both imaginative and compelling. Through the course of their discussion the graduate students of Ohio University will examine the icon of the bird; the bird’s implications both as a source of imagery and as a symbolic representation of the nature of printmakers.
Printmakers, like birds, thrive within a community. Each individual begins a nesting process, a time to gather the materials needed to manifest an idea. The egg of an idea is nurtured and cared-fore by the individual, but protected and accepted by the community until the idea becomes a full grown print. For every mother bird there comes a time when the fledgling must leave the nest. A printmaker very often feels the same reluctance, but necessity of nature to see its offspring go off into the world. Proliferation of the species cannot be denied. Neither can the need for migration; a flocking together on a journey to a different climate for the purpose of feeding and breeding. Printmakers as a community are compelled to join the ilk of their kind, to drink and feast in joyous communion. Ideas are crossbred and multiplied giving each individual new vitality and strength. This is a Convergence.
The symbolic representation of birds in relation to the nature of printmaking is endless. A Dodo can be viewed as a printmaker who insists upon using outmoded technology in a digital age. A Magpie with a penchant for thievery of shiny things can be compared to Warhol himself, borrowing from the glitz and glamour of found imagery and changing the world of art as we knew it, forever. But, our discussion and examination won’t rely on metaphor alone. The history of the imagery of the bird in print will be explored; from the paradisiacal birds found in the margins of a Guttenberg Manuscript to the marvelous prints by artists like Oscar Gillespie will be conveyed in a full color slide presentation. Even unknown avian artists will be called upon to participate, either as contributions to the slide performance or as participants in a Bird Print portfolio exchange. Our intention is to provoke an emotional response from the audience. Imagine the climax of the presentation as a riotous cacophony of bird whistles given as door prizes are blown with wild abandon!
Throughout history birds have been a great source of inspiration and fascination. Printmakers, as a regular course of action make courageous leaps into the unknown. We are confident that a close examination of the fundamental issues surrounding these creatures can lead to marvelous insight and renewed creative productivity.
Panel III A Sense of Space Thursday 10:45-12:30p.m
Chaired by Karen Kunc
Distance invites imagination; expanse emphasizes desire; isolation demands networks; space requires conceptualization. The vastness in which we live is impossible to comprehend, and physically impossible to view. We understand such space by experience – the physical awareness of openness and enclosed, through our travels over the curve of the earth - and by memory – knowing the impossibility of “now” – as our lived moments are adventure and poignancy across human fashioned measures of time and mapping. Yet our current times give us satellite views, astronaut witnesses, daily Doppler maps, the facts and graphic charts of scientific records, as we receive the bombardments of images, viewpoints, instantaneous web-workings. How do artists address such an overload and yet design images of clarity, personal vision, poetic sensitivity to this vastness that means something, that moves us? Can a print affect us beyond mere sentiment? The print is a still moment, yet retains stages of process and lived experience as discrete decisions, as a microcosmic arena to capture space/place. Artists address the sense of space through visual symbols and imagination, research into climate and the edges between, by immersion experiences and an awareness of the imprint of place, through the fragments of space that we can – and need to - comprehend. By virtue of their location in the far reaches of this country, these artists create work that defines the print tradition and also moves the print forward as a necessary and vital contemporary distillation of meaning and means for creative statements of spatial issues.
Panel IV The Martha Stewart Affectation: Printspaces Redefined Thursday 2:30-4p.m
Chaired by Laura Berman and Rachel Melis
Printmakers no longer hold a monopoly on valuing anachronistic, masochistic, and obsessive compulsive labor! Thanks to the contemporary craft empire founded by Martha Stewart and others, letterpress printmaking, screen-printing, Xerox-transferring, stenciling,
embossing, die-cutting, hand-lettering, and many other time-consuming art-making
techniques have become household terms. New tools have arisen to ease each studio process into the home, and printmakers find themselves storming big box stores for sales on Stickermakers and CircleScissors more than to decry cookie-cutter mentalities. A panel of studio artists discusses art making practices that reflect our craft-savvy culture, the value of the handmade, and how today’s craft marketplace is changing the face of contemporary art.
This panel’s topic addresses the convergence of the domestic, design, craft, and art worlds.
The moderators will offer an optimistic perspective on what printmakers gain by leaping
across today’s blurred boundaries while recognizing the problematic capitalist forces that
make such leaps possible. After all, “the Martha Stewart Effect” refers to her court case as
much as to her products. Aware of the complex forces driving our craft savvy culture, as well as the difficulties of aligning art and craft in the first place, the panelists will discuss their own work as well as that of their contemporaries in the context of what they choose to take from Martha’s Living and other similar sources as they make their own artistic lives.
Panel V The Role of Classical Practices in the Digital Age Friday 9-10:30a.m
Chaired by Cynthia Kukla
This panel’s focus on classical working methods in the digital age provides an opportunity to discuss the current relevance of the practice of observation and experiential interpretation. All the panelists use hybrid methologies: using experiential observation along with current technologies appropriate to their work.
I am personally interested in what art work looks like when artists go to the source. In our postmodern era, the use of mediated and double-mediated sources is commonplace, no direct observation required. In contrast, Leon Golub, early in his career, studied objects from antiquity firsthand in Italy for his Gigantomachia and Sphinxes, which formed the foundation for his life work. Golub absorbed the scale of ancient ruins, walking among them; he sketched the ruins in person as Turner and others had done before photography allowed us to remain comfortably in our studios. My premise is that Golub’s image transformations, scale shifts and use of directly observed images evolved from his in-depth observations. Each panelist is ‘going to the source,’ whether the Library of Congress for 19th century treaty maps, government aircraft facilities here and abroad for information on technologies not easily available, or working with the human condition and strategies for meaningful representation in the 21st century.
What happens when so many artists abdicate direct observation of a subject when photographic prints of said subject reduce/codify the visual information? What happens when artists rely on someone else’s reference and take it as fact? How stable and reliable is a photographic or virtual source? How has this changed the artist’s expectation of fact and how a work of art looks?
We wish to address our reliance, perhaps over-reliance on mediated sources and simulacra and that while we can rejoice in new worlds open to us through photography, satellite images of the firmament only imagined by our ancestors, bio-medical visualization that takes us into the microcosm and other imaging technology, that at the same time we should not, as artists, forgo the power of our direct observation of nature and culture when we create art.
Denise Bookwalter "Don't call it a blimp"
Cynthia M. Kukla "Classical Practices: Are Artists Still Embracing Them?"
Holly Morrison "iTouch: Presence and Essence in a Networked World"
Forrest Solis ""Constructed Observations"
Sigrid Wonsil "Compassion, Humanity, Observation: the Real Is Beautiful"
Panel VI The Jentel Experience Friday 9-10:30a.m
Chaired by Gail D. Panske
The current world of printmaking is rich and wide. Because of this, printmaking pushes
its boundaries and limits as other media also push into printmaking. Artists from a wide
range of backgrounds find that the print multiple can play an important role in their
creative work. This phenomenon often stays hidden as artists in different media work,
show, and discuss at conferences in their respective fields. However, when artists are
brought together in a residency setting the exchange of ideas begins to flow between
artists and similarities and differences are revealed.
Between October 15 and November 13, 2007, Susan Grabel, sculptor, Alexis Granwell,
installation artist, Lisa Kriner, fiber artist, and Gail Panske, printmaker, lived and worked
together at Jentel, an artist residency in Banner, Wyoming. It was here, through a series
of presentations and informal discussions, that we discovered how our particular vantage points push against the boundaries of printmaking. Although we approach the print process and the media differently, we are all involved in printmaking at some level. We will discuss the influence of the space we inhabited at Jentel, the convergence of studio artists in a residency, and the role printmaking plays in our individual art.
Panel VII Teaching Critical Thinking in Print Friday 10:45-12:30p.m
Chaired by Jeremy Lundquist
Participants in this panel will be having a discussion regarding teaching strategies, assignments, philosophies and/or overall practices as they relate to critical thinking and conceptual development in the printmaking classroom.
We will be examine the following:
- exploring the extremes of technique driven vs. concept driven instruction
- integration of concept driven assignments that help students to engage in the
practice of critical thinking with technical instruction
- outlining specific printmaking studio course structure that engages students in
critical thinking
- critiques that teach criticality
- working with and past reluctance to engage critical thinking
- why critical thinking is important to the instruction of printmaking
- the unique relationship between critical thought and print media.
Panel VIII The Printmaking Studio: Is There a Fee? Are You Free? Saturday 9-10:30a.m
Chaired by Diane Eicher
How do different colleges and universities handle access to the printmaking
studio if you are a faculty, staff or employee? Do users pay a fee or use the printmaking studio as a perk of working there? Are there limitations in terms of how many prints or the sizes of prints that can be created? How do you address the issue of creating your own private work in a semi-public student oriented shop? The topic of access was first addressed as an informal survey sent to MAPC members last summer and was met with a wide array of responses, which are being formulated for this panel discussion. The research from this survey will be shared as well. This panel discussion will cover different perspectives of how to address the many issues involved with who uses a printmaking studio, the use of space and supplies, and how personal work is created in a public space.
Panel IX Close to Home: Vanitas Revisited, Dwelling on the Past, and The Belted Galloway's
Saturday 9-10:30a.m
Chaired by Kathelene Engrid Galloway
The call for papers for the MAPC Conference, Convergence: Impressions of The Space We Inhabit, got me thinking about the way my newest work, the work of Cheryl Shurtluff and the work of Cima Katz inhabits the crossroads where memory, printmaking, mark making, collecting, and family converge. In this panel, artist-talk each of us reflects on mixing media and employing printmaking to explore the rich, dark, and savory textures of lived experience.
In the article “Herbert Marcus and the Subversive Potential of Art” from the book The Subversive Imagination, Marcus is quoted as having seen the imagination as a place of recombining experience. Through contemporary computer and printmaking technology we each are allowed within our respective bodies of work to skip across time, collaborate with our past, and expand the individual storylines that shift and fade slightly with memory.
Panel X What?!...A Woodcut?! Saturday 10:45-12:30p.m
Chaired by Gesine Janzen
Artists will present their current work and discuss why they choose to use woodcut and/or relief printing, and what its function is in their art making. Time for discussion will allow answers to the following questions.
- What are the connections between the traditional woodcut and the ever-changing innovations in related relief printing media?
- How can this medium be stretched in both extremes?
- In this day of ever more complex technology, how do we express our ideas with one of the most ancient and fundamental ways of printing an image?