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Fit to print
An international conference floods the market
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS

" The New Renaissance, Part I "
At Lillian Immig Gallery, Emmanuel College, Cardinal Cushing Library, 400 the Fenway, Boston, through April 10.

" Seeing Is Believing: Skeptical Print Activity "
At HallSpace, 31 Norfolk Street, Boston, through April 5.

" The Boston Printmakers 2003 North American Print Biennial "
At 808 Gallery at Boston University, 808 Commonwealth Avenue, through April 6.

" Realized in Wood: Contemporary Prints from China "
At the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University, 700 Beacon Street, through April 21.

" Carborundum Printmaking: Henri Goetz and His Legacy "
At Boston University Art Gallery, 855 Commonwealth Avenue, through April 6

When the Southern Graphics Council and the Boston Printmakers convene for an international conference in Boston beginning this Wednesday, it will cap months of print-related exhibits that have taken the city by quiet but remarkable storm. This event is called " Making Histories: Revolution and Representation 2003, " and everybody’s in on it, from the Museum of Fine Arts and the Boston Atheneum to virtually all the area art schools and a large number of the commercial galleries. More than 700 participants will take part; presenters will represent the four corners of the globe — from South Africa to Iceland, from China to Great Britain — and the number of affiliated exhibits that will continue through at least the first week in April exceeds 50. Not to mention the 11 new print portfolios that will be published during the conference, or the special events and lectures that accompany such occasions.

Given such a daunting smorgasbord, what to sample? I decided to limit myself to group shows, maximizing exposure to the greatest number of artists, while trying to concentrate on those group shows that feature multiple works by the participating artists — maybe I could enjoy breadth without wholly relinquishing depth.

Weeks ago, I went with an artist friend to check out the exhibit at Emmanuel College; I wasn’t aware at the time, but it happens to be one of the affiliated printmaker shows. A teacher of printmaking himself, my friend said something that has taken me the last weeks to appreciate — that what he specially liked about the show is that it wasn’t " heavy on technique. "

If every art form has its Achilles’ heel — opera’s might be bombast, poetry’s hermeticism — then the Achilles’ heel of printmaking is technique. A glossary at the back of one of the exhibit catalogues identifies no fewer than 18 ways of making prints across six distinct categories — relief and intaglio printing, lithography, serigraphy, monotypes, digital prints. Relief printing is the opposite of intaglio: the artist carves away at metal or wood and the ink picks up on the raised surface. In intaglio printing, the ink adheres to the recessed lines. Yet within intaglio printing, six different styles predominate — etching, aquatint, engraving, drypoint, mezzotint, collagraph; and two of those styles, engraving and etching, also describe different methods of relief printing.

The danger of all recondite skill sets is that proficiency becomes an end in itself and not a means to communicate something greater. How often have we seen the impeccably trained figure skater whose gravity-defying jumps seem divorced from any understanding of why he or she is jumping in the first place?

Fortunately, the show at Emmanuel, the first leg of an extended two-part exhibit titled " The New Renaissance, " never loses sight of why it’s in the air. Veteran printmakers Deborah Cornell and Constance Jacobson, who teach at the Art Institute of Boston and Boston University respectively (and who are among this year’s most disseminated artists — of the five shows I visited, they were at three), along with Fred Han Chang Liang, who teaches at Mass Art, bring playfulness and inventiveness to what in lesser hands wants to be a humorless, stern process. They also make static forms look alive.

Cornell’s prints — more precisely, photoetchings and aquatints and transfers from digital scans — are softly focused horizontal diptychs that range in scale from tiny (two by three inches) to large (three by four feet) but maintain a dreamy evocativeness through her handling of subject and color. Cornell pairs images of seemingly antithetical objects to make a point about form. In Requiem Canticles: Warrior, she positions a metal draftsman’s compass beside a stone figurine of an ancient, Asian warrior whose unbending, stylized limbs suddenly resonate with the compass’s " legs. " In Requiem Canticles: Pacemaker, she positions the brittle network of a fern beside a chest x-ray with its own network of ribs and implanted machinery. Plant and thoracic cavity become brothers. In Sighting Series: Bone, a spongy, pixilated, miniature human skull floats as if in outer space; to its right, a luminous jellyfish pulsates in an unlit ocean. Cornell’s imaginative, subtle, arresting pairings find their complement in her mastery of technique: she combines the precision of printmaking with the freedom of drawing.

Constance Jacobson’s inkjet prints more closely resemble traditional photography, and her alluring, kinetic images hover between representation and abstraction. Specimen 1 and Specimen 2 look like coffee beans come to life in an aqueous thicket of seaweed — dark, elliptical objects swim among randomly scattered, worm-shaped flora that resemble strands of DNA. Like their even finer counterparts on exhibit at HallSpace (which have been set into panes of glass so they feel like cross-sections of an aquarium), each Specimen fills out a circular space about seven inches across. Set onto squares of white paper, they look simultaneously like portals and Petri dishes; you feel as if you were peering through a giant invisible microscope.

Fred Liang’s abstract images also resemble magnified proteins, and the contours of his prints are also round. Liang’s interest, however, lies in playing variations in color against his more uniform but still swirling spaghetti-shaped strands. He prints his squirming confections onto film that he then mounts on a slight rise of white paper. The result is oddly engaging — pathogens delivered in pleasing pastels.

Another small, exquisite show connected to the printmaking conference takes place at HallSpace — one of Boston’s best-kept secrets of an art gallery. Located in an industrial neighborhood not far from Boston City Hospital, " Seeing Is Believing " offers the accomplished work of six artists besides Jacobson and Cornell. Jean Madison makes what look like collages of newsprint and pictures of human medical deformities; Robert Siegelman’s contribution takes the form of two large, decorative monoprints. An unsettling set of what might be called docu-lithographs by Barbara McGill called All My Moles and Freckles goes beyond being a dermatologist’s dream. The show also includes contributions by David Scott Armstrong, Adele Henderson, and Katherine Gulla.

The centerpiece of the printmaking conference is the giant exhibit at Boston University’s 808 Gallery. Cliff Ackley, curator of prints at the MFA, has done an estimable job here. Unfortunately, the presentation proves so overwhelming — 253 student works to the left; 153 selected works to the right, and all hung salon-style on limited wall space — you almost can’t take it in. For more remunerative viewing, I recommend two nearby shows. At the Art Institute of Boston, a breathtaking exhibit of contemporary prints from China includes the work of four accomplished artists. Outstanding among them is Teng Yu Feng, whose large woodcuts of Chinese peasants convey unflinching, sympathetic truth. And at Boston University Art Gallery, an exhibit by the experimental printmaker and expatriate Henry Goetz (1909–’89) and three of his notable students, Dikran Daderian, Helene Laffly and Denise Zayan, yields a trove of visual rewards.

For more information on the Southern Graphics/Boston Printmaking conference, visit www.bu.edu/events/printconferenceSGC, or call (617) 735-9898.

Issue Date: March 27 - April 3, 2003

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