Art Beat: Printmaking the star of the show at Marion Art Center exhibit
Within the fine arts discipline of printmaking, there are a number of sub-categories. They include engraving and etching, traditional stone lithography and aluminum plate lithography, serigraphy (more commonly referred to as screen printing), chine collé, monoprints, linocuts and wood block printing.
Traditionalists might argue that some contemporary forms of making prints such as inkjet printing are not true printmaking as they do not incorporate a physical, technical, or handmade process. Or that the newer technologies lack artisanry. After all, is a Gilcee print a reproduction (which reminds one of a Staples copy counter) or an impression (which is the romanticized term that old school printmakers prefer?)
“The New Printmakers,” currently on display at the Marion Art Center features work by Taylor Hickey and Janie Kinnane, as well as art by young student artists from Tabor Academy and Old Rochester Regional High School, and the allegiance of the participants seem to be with the traditionalists. As is mine.
Block prints are the star of the show.
Taylor Hickey, who received her MFA in Printmaking from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in 2021, displays block prints in their usual two-dimensional, wall-mounted format as well as printed matter that has been manipulated into three-dimensional forms such as sculpture and art books.
The recurrent theme throughout Hickey’s work is the cosmos itself. The graphic black-and-white starkness of her prints lends itself to an exploration of the macroscopic, as in “Tessellation 1,” in which the blackness of space is bespotted with bright white novas.
“Tessellation 2” features a jet black night sky, which reverberates with mystery and myth. It may be my susceptibility to pareidolia but I see the skull of a bull and the angry grimace of an extraterrestrial wraith.
Hickey displays several artists' books, including “Black Hole Blues,” an expanding accordion book with a perfectly circular hole that travels through it. Displayed within a case, with its pages opened for viewing, is another book, an ode to the moons of the Milky Way and their relationships with the respective planets they orbit.
Little Compton, Rhode Island artist Janie Kinnane’s block prints are far more terrestrial but they are no less fueled with a palpable sense of wonder. At 90’” across, “Bumper,” a magnificently rendered image of a blue whale, is a testament to her skill set as both illustrator and printmaker.
As Hickey pays homage to the magnificence of the heavens, Kinnane honors the majesty of the denizens of the deep.
In “Copious,” Kinnane offers up a marine menagerie that includes a tuna, lobster, crab, flounder and more and her title speaks to the abundance and resilience of the sea. “Iris” is a rich and greatly detailed print that asks the viewer to consider the beauty of the everyday.
The high school student artists displayed prints that show great promise. Among them are Aurora Hayden with her “Ashes of Innocence,” in which a big-eyed waif peers out from a hole against a background field that mimics rows of 35mm film negatives; and Joanne Huang, who presented “Oh, the Human Race!,” a collaged work of printed elements (happy people in green, purple, pink and more) and bits of yarn and mesh and crumpled translucent paper.
Peyton Wolfe’s “Moving On” is a rather intriguing print. A bright blue-furred wolf, with his skeleton in clear view, as if by X-ray, walks away from another dead wolf, gray-black in hue.
My first thought was that the blue wolf had killed the gray-black wolf and was lurking away.
But in retrospect, I think they are the same wolf. The gray-black one is but a carcass, the blue one is “moving on” to the next plane of existence.
“The New Printmakers” is on display at the Marion Art Center, 80 Pleasant St., Marion, through March 24.
This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Art Beat visits The New Printmakers at Marion Art Center
