Dennis Hollingsworth

Cirrus Opening: Jason, Dennis and Todd

Cirrus Gallery Opening:
Monotypes by Jason Meadows, Dennis Hollingsworth and Todd Hebert.

Saturday, January 13th, 2007
Reception: 6-8 pm

I should have figured it out when I watched Joel Mesler buy his first offset printer years ago. Back then, Joel had a space in ChinaTown called Dianne Pruess Gallery where he ran a press, a speakeasy and a music studio down in his basement. He was moving in the direction of publishing, open to the idea of making editions of anything at all: traditional art, music, film, anything. It was notable at the time that what was beginning to happen was that young artists were seeking out small presses to make work with.

Maybe it was because prints had an underdog status in the art world, it seemed like the runt of the art object litter. A print was not as highly regarded as "original art". Sure, there were the great print houses that made editions of the heros of the 60's, but they have come and gone and a shadow was left in their wake. And sure, the editions concept was already applied to artist project multiples, but this is some distance from the traditional machine press on handmade paper, and with the distance from the perceived inferior status came more prestige. Prestige, the blood of the artworld. That was then. Things are changing now maybe because so many young artists who have sought this medium out have now acquired a status of their own, maybe because all things get commoditized in time, maybe because the marquee has to change after all(see artist's anxiety). Finally, in our era of the top dog underdog status imparted some appeal to the medium.

People seem to realize what the artists have seen for some time: that the industrial age process of printmaking has finally justified itself (again) as a medium. Maybe it has happened now because of the hands on aspect of printmaking or that the history of printmaking has generated an a broad array of apporaches in technique and therefore a wide range of expression.

Owner of Cirrus, Jean Milant has put together a show of three editions: myself, Jason Meadows and Todd Hebert to show people a little bit of this bloom.

Jason's work is energetic and yet casual and impromptu. Seeing the prints and hearing the accounts of the folks at Cirrus, it seems to me that Jason takes the maxim "Art (material) is anything within your reach" to a hardcore literal level. A handfull of pocket change, coins tossed on the printing plate, ferns fronds cut from the garden, a scatter of rubber bands, plastic six pac ties. Superpositions of loot taken on the fly in the bright chromas of printer's ink.

Todd's prints look like they had a super strong gravitational field of his attention, focused as he is in recuperating representational imagery in art. I was told that he had hand painted atop printed matter, but I think that is only part of the story. When you print an image, it is an assembly of actions that compile into something recognizeable. Working from background to foreground, the final application of the hand is in the same technical system of the machine... if you can place an airbrush on the same plane as a 1950 steel German beast of a printing machine.

As for my prints ("OVEJAS NEGRAS", "Black Sheep"), I would characterise them as something for which the ink itself was the plate (the instrument for imparting ink to the paper) and the machine itself was used like a brush to paint a series of works on paper simultaneously. Processes would set themselves up and from time to time, I disrupted them to find others, such as little adventures working with Victorian end paper processes, French marbling (so as to parallel the machine with ink floating on water instead of steel) or dropping spot applications with hand rollers.

Monotypes at Cirrus next Friday.
I'll see you there!