NO VACANCY!

What a weekend!

This Friday brought NO VACANCY, the Printmaking senior thesis show at the Des Lee Gallery on Washington Avenue here in St. Louis! We printmakers filled the gallery to the brim with selected bits of our thesis work, and the gallery-going public of St. Louis filled all the nooks and crannies that were left over - there truly was no vacancy.

 Installations by Katie Ford (Foreground) and Annie Stephens (Background)

What can I say without sounding pompous or self-important? It was a great show, or so we were told by all who came to see. Many people threw around the word ambitious; others threw around the word awesome. I think I would agree with both. Because in Printmaking, we like to make big things. And printmaking processes take a long time, a lot of planning, and a lot of care in execution. 

Interior of installation by Annie Stephens

Another thing that sets our department apart from other printmaking programs is our focus on conceptual development alongside technical development. Often this means that we do not adhere strictly to traditional printmaking methods as our sole means of artmaking (although there are certainly people who do focus primarily on traditional techniques). Many of us will mix printmaking with sculptural installation, as with Annie Stephens' installation pictured above, which featured three costumed characters who sit across from you on pink benches in a large tent as you read their stories in the book Annie made.

Installation by Katie Ford

Many students choose to make work that is socially or community engaged. In the past we have had printmakers create brightly-colored and lushly textured plush environments in which people of all ages discover their inner children, or organize quilting bees to bring together various friends and strangers to work together and make community while sewing on a printed quilt of recycled fabric. This installation pictured above by Katie Ford focuses on the relationship between old decaying buildings and the people who inhabit the areas around them. In Saint Louis, there are so many gorgeous or awesome buildings which, after being deserted by their inhabitants, have fallen into complete decay. The decay itself though is also beautiful, bringing new organic life into a space where humans no longer live. By intervening in these environments, Katie's installations make those who see them think about the spaces they occupy and how they decay or are preserved. Katie's work is just one example of our socially-engaged work in Printmaking.

Tragic Kingdom by Judit Bognar

Others among us work with issues that affect an even larger community than our local area. Judit Bognar's embroidered collagraph on canvas speaks about the fading of Hungarian culture and the loss of identity that ensues. The floral motifs in her work come from each of 27 regions of Hungary, where each locality has its own traditional designs, passed down from generation to generation, which not only hold their own symbolic significances but also can be used to identify what region the person wearing or using this design is from. Some of the motifs are partially filled with embroidery, a traditional folk art technique of the region, while some are lightly painted. The scarcity of the colored parts speaks not only to the fading of the culture, but also to the possibility that future generations might fill them in and bring back the rich and deep cultural traditions which have faded over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Woodcut and collage by John Witty

Playfulness and a love of the past also figure in many printmakers' vocabularies. A prime example here is John Witty's work, which combines woodcuts based on images from early American portraiture with collaged photographs from the 20th century. Fascinated by the ways we remember and commemorate not only our personal pasts but also the general past eras of our culture, John creates collages which combine the more contemplative elements of the woodcuts  with unexpected and strange photographic assemblages, such as the hybrid porcelain pergola with German gymnasts in the image above.

Installation by Eleanor Ryburn

Gaining our inspiration from all kinds of sources, we integrate them into our work, allowing the objects which strike us with wonder to appear alongside our interpretations of them. In Eleanor Ryburn's installation, viewers not only examine a book filled with drawings of various astounding natural phenomena, they also examine the natural objects themselves or sit in a small tent surrounded by luminescent feathers and the sounds of sighs (not pictured). By presenting these all in conjunction, the intersection between the wonder of new knowledge and the reactions produced are joined in the viewer's experience.

You Deserve it All

Printmaking has a long and honored tradition of both being a form of mass information dissemination, but also a satirical medium used to criticize institutions and social practices across a wide variety of cultures. In my own work, I combine both of these aspects to point out the idiosyncracies of contemporary American life. In You Deserve It All, I pit the ultimate symbol of middle-class arrival, the American Dream of single-family homeownership against the cacaphony of outside voices telling consumers to buy more, thereby diverting and draining their resources away from building a more secure life. Inspired by the credit glut and ensuing foreclosure crisis, I created a piece which plays with the seductive, deceptive promises of advertising and highlights the somewhat tragic contradictions of American corporate culture in a humorous way.

There are many more images of the show and much more I could say about the various pieces, but given the fact that I do, indeed, have more schoolwork to do, I think I will leave my report at this:

AWESOME SHOW, GREAT JOB

thanks Printmakers!

 Cat Lady, with some gallery-going friends.