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Victoria Gail-White
Anne Lewis
TCM 10th Anniversary, 2006
Titus O'Brien
Christopher Saunders
Anthony Mariani
Kurt Shaw
SFCA Artreach, 2002
Virginia Wageman
Suzanne Tswei
TCM, 2000
Chris Cook
808 Scene Zine: Lit Muse, 2009
Honolulu Advertiser, 2009
Vie Des Arts, Montreal, 2007
Fort Worth/Dallas Star-Telegram, 2006
"Comic Release", New Orleans, 2003
Fort Worth Weekly, 2004
Pittsburg Live, 2003
Honolulu Advertiser, 2000
Honolulu Star Bulletin, 2000
Punchy 'P.R.I.N.T. news' exhibit is truly hot off the presses
By TITUS O'BRIEN
SPECIAL TO THE STAR-TELEGRAM
Posted on Sun, Mar. 26, 2006
Artists' prints are sexy. There is an almost fetishistic pleasure in their outdated tactility. Visceral, evocative and subtle, the processes usually considered fine art printmaking are antiquated relics, case studies in the history of European image making going back any number of centuries. A vague, undefined nostalgia is always at play in the making and viewing of prints, even as the processes are pushed and updated.
The viewer's experience echoes the artist's: It is layered and mediated. An artist who normally might work alone with brush and paint, chisel and stone, or screen and mouse, is suddenly in need of a master craftsperson to baby them through touchy processes. A gesture that might normally be immediate and final goes through five iterations before the finished print rolls out the other end of the press. This often results in unexpectedly dense complexity and inspired collaboration.
Since 1993, the University of North Texas' Print Research Institute of North Texas in Denton has been hosting visiting artists and assisting them in the creation of bodies of print works. Six of these artists are featured in "P.R.I.N.T. news," a punchy show currently at Fort Worth's UNT artspace FW gallery. Among the best known are James Surls and Enrique Chagoya. Displayed next to one another, they form a nice contrast: Surls' cosmic/shamanic incantations of the transcendentally natural, against Chagoya's hilarious and vivid religio-political allegories.
Paul Booker is the youngest artist in the show, and while I applaud his attempt at a sculptural solution and a novel approach, the results seem insubstantial compared with other works here. Both titled Blue Rectangles, his two pieces don't add up to more than the sum of their lazily scribbled and pinned-together parts.
The L-shaped gallery is divided by gender, and the women create an engrossing dialogue on the other end. Gladys Nilsson seems to work happily outside of current trends, using nostalgic possibilities as she works on top of old childhood photographs. I thought of Red Grooms, Shel Silverstein and Maira Kalman, all artists who conjure and re-explore the depth and magic in a child's experience.
Sally French, too, uses childhood imagery, but with an edgier bite. Her series using a windup mutant duck toy as motif are as unsettling as they are playful. They demonstrate how the most mundane objects can become totemic, like Mike Kelly's scary stuffed toys on blankets, or Paul McCarthy's Pinocchio masks.
Andrea Rosenberg's two works are like a luscious marriage of Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, combining the former's gestural abstraction and smart compositional sense with the latter's perceptual contour drawings of flowers and plants. They are lovely.
All three of these women are of the same generation, later in their careers, and I appreciated the rigor and solidity of their offerings here. The exhibition demonstrates nicely how this type of residency and collaboration can result in exciting and surprising subversions of expectation. I hope we continue to see follow-up shows of other visiting artists.
P.R.I.N.T. news
Through April 26
UNT artspace FW, 3400 Camp Bowie Blvd.
(817) 735-0205, www.art.unt.edu/print
Titus O'Brien is an artist and writer living in Dallas. He teaches visual art at the University of Texas, Dallas. titusobrien@gmail.com.