Time, Ink

By Arthur Whitman

Over the last ten years, The Ink Shop has developed, fostered, and nurtured an exhibitions program that may very well be the best in Ithaca dedicated specifically to contemporary art. Their shows are genuinely and thoughtfully curated (uncommon here outside of our university venues), with work that reflects a refreshing independence from the concerns of academe. Marking the anniversary of their first decade, 10 Years of The Ink Shop: In Prints and Books is an exhibit that celebrates the group’s cultivation of endurance and productivity.

After spending its first year in an old airplane factory, the group moved downtown into a memorable space on the second floor above Handwork. The building, unfortunately, fell victim to a fire in early 2008, which forced the Shop to relocate. They quickly found a new space on the second floor of the Community School of Music and Arts and eventually committed to staying there. Now the printmaking group now puts on about six shows a year, provides working space to its members, hosts artists’ talks, and teaches a range of techniques to the public.

The invited artists are friends or associates of the group, and all but one are represented by a single piece. It’s a big sprawling show that fills both the first floor lobby and hallway of the CSMA, as well as the Shop’s upstairs space. The work uses a wide range of contemporary and traditional printmaking techniques. Styles and subjects are widely varied; indeed, the show is a useful primer for anybody unfamiliar with the range of contemporary artmaking.

Zevi Blum and Steven Barbash are old masters of Ithacan art: both combine impeccable technique with a grandiose approach to subject matter. (In this context, the work of Gillian-Pederson Krag is much missed.) Both are romantics with a taste for intricate line-work, and both are showing etchings.

Blum is the more whimsical. His black and white “Life’s Voyage” shows a row of improbable standing figures—a bishop, jugglers, a three-legged bird-man, elaborately dressed ladies one atop the other—out at sea on what appear to be floating bathyspheres. Barbash’s “Looking Up from a Swim #3,” although nominally a realistic scene of forest and river, has its own sense of the fantastic. We get the sense of a self-enclosed world. Its allover green tint seems to symbolize the forest more than illustrate it.

The forceful directness of Neil Berger’s black and white monotype “Bathers” takes an opposing approach. We see three swimmers, including a shadowy nude boy standing on a platform. The approach is painterly; the brushy rendering of moving water and reflected light is particularly well done.

Pamela Drix’s “Remembering Birkenau: Julian” deals literally and metaphorically with contact between people and the land. It derives from a photograph taken by the artist last year showing her young adult son visiting the Nazi death camp. We see, looking down, his legs. (The artist has created a whole series of leg prints, alongside other Holocaust-related works. Some of these can be seen in her current solo show at the Main Street Gallery in Groton.)

Her use of mixed media is striking. The rocky ground, gum-transferred from the photo, is relatively weighty: shimmering light-filled purples, oranges, and greens. Julian’s legs somehow suggest gravity despite their seeming lack of substance. They are white silhouettes with details (pants, shoes) in graphite and coating of translucent white encaustic. A border of white thread has been sewn around them, further emphasizing rootedness, albeit in a slightly creepy way.

Jenny Pope’s color reduction woodcut “Plan B – Mirrors in Space” takes a playfully narrative approach to a serious subject: a proposal (supposedly under real-life consideration) to prevent global warming by constructing satellites to deflect light into deep space. Hers are characteristically offbeat subjects: gray spotted doughnuts projecting grids and flower-pinwheels. The perspective is also odd. We are at once lost in space and hovering mere feet above a crowd of penguins on snowy ground. Her visual means are exuberant: energetic curving lines, solid areas of bold (and improbable) color, incessant patterning.

Masha Ryskin’s small abstract “Still” incorporates collage and etching: the former delicate and pastoral, the latter sharp and aggressive like a needle scraping skin. The careful layering of thin, translucent, fibrous, wrinkled papers – gray over warm white – calls to mind the collage master Anne Ryan. The black, black-blue, and green-ochre etched lines form dense fields of hatching. “Still” suggests landscape as well as the body.

The work of Susan Goldman and Tarrant Clements recalls a number of early twentieth-century precedents, Cubism and Art Deco among them. Goldman’s black, white and red-orange “Red Spot Pot” juxtaposes three silhouetted vessel forms against dense knot and starburst patterns. Clements’ “X-4 Variant” is abstract, with suggestions of musical notation.

Alan Singer has been using digital technology to update abstract and surrealist traditions in intriguing ways. His monoprint “Street Talkers” shows a crowded mob of computer-generated forms in front of what appears to be a folded screen or the opened pages of a book. Particularly surrealist is the low horizon with a strip of realistic ocean in the background. The sky is twilight pink and blue, its subtle hand-made painterliness a somewhat odd contrast. The piece has an odd sense of nostalgic futurist optimism – a few decades out of date, but in a good way. (I was reminded loosely of computer graphics and science fiction from the eighties.)

The appropriation of images from popular or historical sources – sometimes blended into busy, even borderline incoherent compositions – is another recurring theme. Mixed media is common with this approach, often using the digital and/or photographic. This is a reflection of a zeitgeist in contemporary art, perhaps a slightly tired one.

Rebecca Godin’s relatively spare mixed media “Bettie Fan” incorporates a Japanese fan into a homage to the 50s pinup. Minna Resnick’s “There’s not a word of truth in it” combines a skillful graphite drawing of a wild-haired woman in a dress—perhaps taken from a fashion magazine—with printed antique wallpaper and images of tableware and a man’s hat.

Patricia Hunsinger’s screenprint “The Transitory State of Being” and April Katz’s inkjet and lithograph “One Daughter of Eve” are among the stronger examples of mixed-image baroque. Both deal with the female body. Much of Hunsinger’s work is conceived around her growing children. “Being” interweaves several images in impressive iconographic and visual coherence: the headless torso of a young woman, antique botanical drawings and text, childlike renderings of flowers and mathematical equations—including a number-line suggesting progressions and growth. The texture is grainy and the shapes overlap translucently. The color is punchy, suggesting fashion and design.

The bodily reference in Katz’s piece is more obscure—as is the color and texture: a smoky soup of brown, gray, ochre, and silver. The piece is layered with text and images reflecting attempts by the artist to understand herself through the tools of modern science following a 1991 breast cancer diagnosis. Among them: a woman from an old alchemical illustration, strands of letters (e.g. GACAT…) representing her mitochondrial DNA, a black fish skeleton, a calendar, images of skin and cells.

With photography as a point of departure for so much of the work here, it is refreshing to see a couple pieces of straightforwardly observational work done in the medium. An untitled gelatin-silver print by Pitt Venhem shows a row of drab, multi-story row houses. In front of them is a children’s play structure, also with a vertical emphasis. Its high contrast lights and shadow make it stick out. In this skillful image, we see a contrast between the real and the ideal, the workaday adult world and that of childhood imagination.

The contemporary genre of the artists’ book combines traditional approaches to hand-bookmaking with creative and often highly novel experimentation. Often the emphasis is sculptural, allowing the viewer to move around rather than sticking to a sequence of pages.

Maddy Rosenberg’s elaborately folded architectural fantasy “Dystopia” is a superb example of work in this fully three-dimensional vein. Printed from linoleum blocks in brown ink, this dense and fragmented city scene is an artful pastiche of pre-twentieth-century styles.

Sequence is a subject in Craig Mains’ “Oil Rig Zoetrope,” a hand-cranked animation device fitted with a paper loop showing a rig buffeted by the sea.

Featuring 55 artists, this exhibit is rather large by the standards of local art. The show could have been even more profuse, possibly even at the expense of the usual broad spacing of pieces. Two or three pieces per artist—at least for some of them—would have given a more generous sense of their creative work. Still, this is a strong show that merits the label of required viewing.

10 Years will be on show at the Ink Shop and the CSMA through June 22^nd. A “Talk Print” lecture with the Shop’s founders will be held on Thursday, June 10 from 6-8pm. The retrospective flavor will continue their next show, featuring the last decade’s worth of Peter Kahn Fellows (July 2 through August 24). There will be a concurrent show featuring Mains’ promotional graphics for the Shop.

Tagged as: anniversary, Art Review, Arthur Whitman, decade, The Ink Shop