PUSHING THE PRESS:
an exhibition organized by the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lyndon House Arts Center Printmaking in the South
This catalogue is generously supported by Elizabeth and Roberto Goizueta.
Partial support for the exhibitions and programs at the Georgia Museum of Art and the Lyndon House Arts Center is provided by the Georgia Council for the Arts through appropriations of the Georgia General Assembly. The council is a partner agency of the National Endowment for the Arts. Individuals, foundations, and corporations provide additional museum support through their gifts to the University of Georgia Foundation. The Georgia Museum of Art is located in the Performing and Visual Arts Complex on UGA’s East Campus. The address is 90 Carlton Street, Athens, GA, 30602-1502. For more information, including hours, see georgiamuseum.org or call 706-542-4662. Lyndon House Arts Center, located at 293 Hoyt Street, is a facility of the Athens-Clarke County Leisure Services Department. All exhibitions are free and open to the public during regular gallery hours: Tuesdays and Thursdays from noon to 9 p.m. and Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Cover: Chadwick Tolley, Monster Truck (detail)
Georgia’s Printmakers Georgia’s legislature, in making the Georgia Museum of Art the state’s official art museum by proclamation in 1982, reaffirmed the beliefs and wishes of our founder, Alfred Heber Holbrook, who hoped following generations of staffs and patrons would expand our educational and exhibition services to all the people of the state. This exhibition continues that tradition of bringing art to the people, of advancing our native artists, and of developing, on the grass roots levels, programs in arts education and teaching. If icing is needed for this cake, the project allows us to form a partnership with the Lyndon House Arts Center in Athens and its director, whom we acknowledge with gratitude for her helping us to bring to fruition, yet again, our founder’s mandate.
William Underwood Eiland Director, Georgia Museum of Art University of Georgia, Athens
Pushing the Press It comes as no surprise that the state of Georgia is rich with innovative, interesting, experimental professionals working in the field of art. This exhibition began taking form with a road trip, as I traveled around the state visiting artists working with prints and printmaking and stepping into their working worlds. Some of the artists included here are true to the traditional techniques of printmaking and the history of the production of multiples but bring a rigorous contemporary consideration to the medium. Others expand printmaking by incorporating 3D objects and urban graffiti. Their differences in subject and approach make for an interesting conversation in the contemporary arts.
My hope is that this exhibition reveals a small slice of the excellence in the printmaking arts that is spread across the state.
Didi Dunphy Guest curator Program supervisor, Lyndon House Arts Center
Curtis Bartone
bio Curtis Bartone’s paintings, drawings, etchings, and lithographs have been shown in twenty-one solo exhibitions and in more than seventy-five group exhibitions. He has received numerous grants and awards, including a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant and two Illinois Arts Council Grants. Bartone has been awarded several international residencies and has been invited as a visit- ing artist by several colleges and universities. In the summer of 2016, he will be a resident artist at Emmanuel College in Boston, Massachusetts, where he will create a suite of etchings based on the Plagues of Egypt. Currently, he resides in Savannah, Georgia, with his wife and seven cats, where he splits his time between making prints and teaching printmaking at the Savannah College of Art and Design. artist’s statement Filtered through the lens of art history, natural sciences, lit- erature, religion/mythology, and contemporary mass media, Curtis Bartone’s work explores the idea of wilderness and how it has changed from being a tangible, albeit romanti- cized, place to a distorted fiction or myth taking form in arti - ficial and virtual realities. This myth has a powerful effect on our fragmented perception of the environment and our place in it. Throughout history humankind has striven to dominate and exploit “wildness” for its benefit, while at the same time art has been employed as a means to translate, analyze, and reconfigure the idea of nature. Bartone’s recent pieces create hybrid quilted landscapes, incorporating incongruous situa- tions and elements as a device to examine and question the human need not only to classify and control—perhaps out of a fear of chaos and uncertainty—but to intervene and claim our place in the fabric of the landscape.
Ora et Labora
Kristin Casaletto
bio Kristin Casaletto exhibits nationally and internation- ally and has shown with such artists as Nick Cave, Betye Saar, Sue Coe, and Faith Ringgold. She has won numerous awards, grants, and fellowships and has held residencies at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Work- shop in New York, among many others. Her art is held in university, institutional, and museum collections such as the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, and the Eli and Edythe Broad Museum of Art at Michigan State University. Casaletto has a bachelor’s of fine arts in drawing and a bachelor’s of science in physics, both from Ball State University, as well as a master’s degree in art history from Michigan State University and a master of fine arts in painting with a minor emphasis in printmaking from Western Michigan University. She is based in Augusta, Georgia. artist’s statement Kristin Casaletto’s art charts an aggressive exploration of the ethics and politics of class, gender, race, and citi- zenship in a superpower nation. Her art springs from an impulse to draw, both as a means of contemplation and of action. The work, often monumentally scaled, fuses high-art media and techniques (painting, printmaking, drawing) with less orthodox materials and methods (food, insects, found objects, sound, sculpture, collabora- tion) to function as parables for a secular age. Her work draws on history and allegory as it recontextualizes icons embedded in American culture to create richly nuanced observations of twenty-first-century life.
Lost Cause/Jefferson Davis, Dead Fish
Melissa Harshman
bio Melissa Harshman received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1992. She has taught at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art since 1993 and is the chair of its printmaking and book arts department. Harshman has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. Recent shows include Print- making Now , at the Imago Gallery in Warren, Rhode Island; 4th Art at Wharepuke Open Printmaking Exhibition , in Northland, New Zealand; Shock Print , at the Ulrich Museum at Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas; and Re-Riding History , at the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum in St. Augustine, Florida. She was an artist in residence at the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica in 2014 and at Zea Mays Printmaking Studio in 2015. artist’s statement For the past two years I have been interested in the aesthetic influence of the chandelier on my work. This idea has been germinating for several years with small additions of chan- delier beads to pieces in the past. Recently, I have decided to make this idea the main focus of my work. My goal is not to replicate a chandelier, but to reference its arrangement with the use of printed chandelier crystals along with actual beads attached to these printed components. I am also interested in the play of the shadows created by the hanging beads juxta- posed with the aesthetic qualities of the printed pieces. Works are created to expand on a wall, emphasizing the scale of chandeliers. This work has been referred to as “wall jewelry.” I enjoy this comparison as both jewelry and chandeliers can be viewed as objects of beauty and adornment—items that enrich our lives.
Swoop
Jiha Moon
bio Jiha Moon is from DaeGu, Korea, and lives and works in Atlan- ta, Georgia. She received her master of fine arts degree from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her works have been acquired by the Asia Society, New York, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; the Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gar- den, Washington, DC; the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greens- boro, North Carolina; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia. She has had solo exhibitions at the Mint; the Cheekwood Botanical Garden and Museum of Art, Nashville, Ten- nessee; and Rhodes College’s Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, Tennessee. She has been included in shows at the Atlanta Con- temporary Art Center; the Asia Society; the Drawing Center and White Columns, New York, New York; the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Her midcareer survey exhibition, Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here , organized by Halsey Institute, is touring museum venues around the country until 2018.
artist’s statement Why do people love foreign stuff so much? When we travel to other countries, explore different cultures, and meet with new people, we tend to fall in love with things that are not our own. People have a soft spot for foreign things. I feel that it is because we add our own experience and imagination to the unfamiliar, which can lead us to misunderstanding it. It is a lot like tourism. As a foreigner living in the United States, I often think about what authenticity really means, and I think we often misunderstand it. My recent work on paper, sculpture, and prints explore the idea of something foreign. What I make might appear foreign and exotic or might look familiar and comforting, but you have to look carefully to understand what you’re really experiencing. Ultimately, everyone except ourselves is foreign. Examining misunderstanding is part of the necessary process of understanding others. I want to share that experience.
Day for Night
Tom Nakashima
bio Tom Nakashima was born in Seattle and received a master of fine arts degree from the University of Notre Dame. He is emer - itus professor at the Catholic University of America and Morris Eminent Scholar Emeritus at Augusta University. His work is in the permanent collections of the Corcoran, Smithsonian Ameri- can Art Museum; the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Caro- lina; and the Long Beach Museum of Art, California. He has received awards including the Joan Mitchell Fellowship; Walter Gropius Master Artist, Huntington Museum; Awards in the Visual Arts 11, DC Commission on Arts & Humanities (1984, 1988, and 1989); the Mayor’s Award for Excellence, Washing- ton, DC; Mid-Atlantic Visual Arts Fellowship (1992 and 1996); Virginia Commission for the Arts; and National Printmaking Fellowship (NEA), Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking.
artist’s statement In this postmodern era I find myself an artist existing outside my time. No—you can’t go back, and I wouldn’t want to—not to modernism. I ascribe a great deal of value to order, purity, and integrity. I sit in the debris of the classical world and existentialism, trying to hold onto the idea of “essence as noun”—the essence of good and evil, of Kant’s sublime. My desire is to imbed my work with some quality that predates definition. I confess to having moved forward to find great in - terest in Kierkegaard, but I am too romantic to take the “leap” toward Heidegger and Continental philosophy. I did not miss the boat—I just took another one. There is much that appeals to me within the worlds of postmodern philosophy and art. There is a lot of good art being referred to as postmodern— but postmodern it isn’t. Georgia Red
Georgia Red
Ann Stewart
bio Ann Stewart is a visual artist who uses drawing, printmaking, and sculpture to investigate the visualization of perception. Stewart received her master of fine arts degree from the Uni - versity of Michigan and her bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from Auburn University. She has shown her work at whitespace, Fay Gold Gallery, Mason Murer Fine Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, in Atlanta; Interna- tional Print Center New York, Robert Henry Contemporary, and Christie’s, New York; and the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art, Auburn, Alabama. She has attended residencies at Penland School of Craft, Vermont Studio Center, Atlanta Printmakers Studio, and Anchor Graphics. She lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. artist’s statement I have always had a fascination with trying to figure out how people make sense of things and attend to visual phenomena. How does what I see become what I know and what is the best way to visualize this translation? As a visual artist, I make work that documents this process. In my research, I draw in- spiration from the disciplines of cognitive science, philosophy, and architecture. Using the tools of mapping and patterning as well as receiving inspiration from bottom up construction in which small interactions create larger entities, I produce forms that allude to living systems, natural phenomena, and architectural structures. In my most recent body of work, I use drawing, printmaking, and sculpture to give a physical pres- ence to the invisible process of perception. By using a process of pattern recognition and pattern generation, both finding and fabricating forms, I negotiate the boundary between randomness and structure.
Anamorphic Loop
Jon Swindler
bio Jon Swindler is an associate professor of art and associate director of the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the Univer- sity of Georgia in Athens. He holds a bachelor’s degree in studio art and art education from Fort Hays State Universi- ty in Hays, Kansas, and a master’s degree in studio art from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. Over the last several years, he has exhibited his work in numerous solo, competitive, and invitational exhibitions both nationally and internationally. Jon has also performed visiting artist workshops and lectures at various institutions, including, the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri; HDK School of Design and Craft, Dals Långed, Sweden; and the Society of North- ern Alberta Print Artists, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. artist’s statement An essential byproduct of my creative activity is an abun- dance of printed remnants, or visual leftovers. Accumulated failures, incidents, and accidents (on paper) acquire involun- tary visual connotations. Surfaces possessing this quality are continually reprinted or recycled, creating unforeseen visual phenomena and fluctuating conceptual circumstances. In the studio, the act of making (for me) is a contradictory one, at once highly systematic, yet randomized. Everything derived out of my creative production is considered relevant and nothing superfluous. The plates and prints I generate are regarded as components, not images. These compo- nents are combined to create naturally contrasting states of visual information; transitions of technique, mark, color, and content that is born out of unedited studio activity. Out of this process, I seek to develop works of art, which feel by contrast calculated, intentional, and well crafted.
Collected Carpet (Samples)
Chadwick Tolley
artist’s statement My work begins as a process of collecting. I collect photos, textures, magazine clippings, and notes from personal observation. Most of these materials are assembled togeth- er in my sketchbook to create a sort of logbook. It is in my sketchbook that I process ideas and create drawing assemblages from which I develop prints. My drawings and prints are filled with visual metaphors that suggest a narrative. Each narrative is an intuitive response to mate- rial accumulated through observation, introspection, and visual mapping. I do not intend to create autobiographical work but often use personal experience as a point of ref- erence. My hope is that the final image will have enough information to suggest meaning but remain ambiguous enough to allow for personal interpretation.
bio Born in Missoula, Montana, Chadwick Tolley has a bachelor of fine arts degree in printmaking from the University of Utah and a master of fine arts degree, also in printmaking, from the University of Oregon. He teaches printmaking and drawing at Augusta University in Augusta, Georgia. He has exhibited widely across the United States and has won various awards for his work, including a Purchase Award in the Atlanta Print Biennial; a Pur- chase Prize in the exhibition Ink and Clay in Pomona, California; the C.G. Metals Purchase Prize from the Boston Print Biennial; and a best in show award from the Oso Bay North American Printmaking Exhibition. His work is included in several public collections in the United States and in the Guandong Museum of Art in China and the Jordanian National Gallery of Art in Amman, Jordan.
Fruit Salad
Joe Tsambiras
bio Joe Tsambiras is a printmaker living in Atlanta, Geor- gia. He received a master of fine arts degree in drawing and printmaking from Georgia State University in 2007. He is a founding member of the Atlanta Printmakers Studio (APS), teaches etching workshops at APS, works as a drawing and printmaking instructor at Kennesaw State University, and contributes to the development of the local art community. He regularly exhibits work locally, nationally, and internationally, and his work can also be found in private collections and in the collection of Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
artist’s statement My work depicts a mythic world filled with imagery derived from the natural world, medieval references, children’s fairy tales, mythology, science fiction, and contemporary culture. It is not my intention to evoke a strictly realistic environment that one might understand via the five senses. Rather, I am interested in the space where nonlinear reasoning, intuition, and logic collide. Through the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements, I create a sense that the realistic and the fan- tastic are overlapping, leaving the viewer unsure where one begins and the other ends. While I draw from the wildness of the natural world, I take these elements and place them in a carefully structured setting, which further subverts the expectations of the viewer. As in a dream, the eye moves from one object to another without conscious direction, flowing between our known world and another.
Children of Alice II
I hear the water dreaming
Checklist of the Exhibition
Melissa Harshman Chandelier Line-Up , 2013 Screenprint on wood, chandelier beads 12 x 42 x 2 inches
All works collection of the artist unless otherwise indicated.
Kristin Casaletto Debutante , 2010 Etching and mixed media on clothing iron 1/3 9 x 4 x 6 inches Kristin Casaletto Inmate Dreams , 2004 Intaglio and relief with lemon juice on Rives BFK and Mulberry papers 1/2 9 x 24 inches Kristin Casaletto Just What Is It that Makes Jefferson Davis So Virile, So Appealing? , 2009–10 Color intaglio, chine-collé, and additional color on Rives BFK 2/5 19 x 18 inches Kristin Casaletto Lost Cause/Jefferson Davis, Dead Fish , 2010 Color etching with aquatint and chine- collé on paper 13 x 11 inches Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of the artist GMOA 2010.295 Melissa Harshman Swoop , 2015 Etching and relief prints on Plexiglas,
Melissa Harshman Chandelier Line , 2015 Relief prints, chandelier beads 4 x 188 x 1 inches
Curtis Bartone Venice Nocturne (triptych), 2012
Jiha Moon Day for Night , 2008 Screenprint on Arches cover with Thai- Kozo chine-collé Edition of 28 Published by Flying Horse Editions 18 x 24 inches Jiha Moon Lichtenstein’s Peaches , 2008 Screenprint on Arches cover with Thai- Kozo chine-collé Edition of 28 Published by Flying Horse Editions 18 x 24 inches Jiha Moon Myo I , 2010 Four-color screenprint with hand-painted chine-collé Edition of 22 Published by PRINT at University of North Texas Printed by Ryan Burkhart 18 x 18 inches
Etching, drypoint, scraping/burnishing Produced at Venice Printmaking Studio 39 x 27 inches (each) Curtis Bartone Aphrodisiac , 2016 Artist’s proof, etching and drypoint 24 x 36 inches
Curtis Bartone Ora et Labora (diptych), 2012 Etching, drypoint, scraping, and burnishing Edition of 10 36 x 24 inches (each)
Curtis Bartone Where Were You? , 2012 Etching 11 x 18 inches
Kristin Casaletto Belle , 2010 Etching and mixed media on canned ham 3/3 8 x 5 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches
chandelier beads 38 x 40 x 1 inches
Jiha Moon Take Out , 2012 3-D lithograph Printed by Landfall Press 20 1/2 x 21 1/2 inches (as 2D) (Both 2D and 3D versions included) Tom Nakashima Georgia Red , 2008 Artist’s proof, intaglio with chine-collé on BFK 3/7 22 1/4 x 30 inches Tom Nakashima Doubled—Stewart’s Sticks , 2006 Artist’s proof, Vitreograph with digital transfer 29 3/4 x 40 3/4 inches Tom Nakashima Winter , 2005 Artist’s proof, hand-colored collagraph and chine-collé Edition of 15 29 3/4 x 37 inches
Ann Stewart Epicenter , 2013 Etching and aquatint on paper 6/7 12 x 12 inches Ann Stewart Amplified Double Doppelganger , 2013 Etching and aquatint on paper 5/5 15 x 22 inches
Chadwick Tolley Fruit Salad , 2015 Screenprint 2/4 22 x 30 inches
Joe Tsambiras I hear the water dreaming , 2013 Etching and aquatint 14 x 20 inches
Joe Tsambiras Dream/Window, 2013 Etching and aquatint 29 1/2 x 14 inches
Ann Stewart Untitled sculpture from the series Epiphenomena and Non Sequiturs , 2015 9 Plexiglas cubes with 3D-printed nylon objects 5 x 5 x 5 inches each Jon Swindler (with Nick Satinover) Collected Carpet (Samples) , 2014 Relief, lithography, screenprint, and monotype 12 x 12 inches (each)
Joe Tsambiras The Sirens of Anthemoessa , 2016 Etching and aquatint 23 x 17 inches Joe Tsambiras Children of Alice I , 2016 Etching, aquatint, and spit-bite 1/15 12 x 36 inches Joe Tsambiras Children of Alice II , 2016 Etching, aquatint, and spit-bite 12 x 36 inches
Chadwick Tolley Monster Truck , 2014 Relief and lithography 1/3 25 x 33 1/2 inches
Tom Nakashima The Ciderhouse , 2004–5 Lithograph on paper 22 x 30 inches
Chadwick Tolley Happy, Happy, Happy , 2015 Screenprint mounted on panel 2/4 29 1/2 x 63 inches
Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia; Gift of Jackson A. Cheatham GMOA 2005.144
Ann Stewart Anamorphic Loop , 2015 Etching and aquatint on paper 1/ 6 15 x 15 inches
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