The technical complexity of printmaking requires a careful personality, but the uncertainty of the results necessitates being a risk-taker. In its use of age-old and new media, printmaking appeals to traditionalists as well as those who like to try new things. These paradoxes are amply illustrated by the 16 artists who were invited by UNLV art department chair Jeff Burden to participate in AmplePROOF: Invitational Printmaking Exhibition.
Wayne Kimball best exemplifies the paradox. He is a meticulous craftsman and traditionalist but displays a very modern sense of irony. His lithographs are influenced by the small scale and high finish of Northern Renaissance paintings and Indian miniatures. Lithography (greasy crayon applied to a stone, zinc or aluminum, water-washed and then inked) achieves marvelous textural effects by means of the natural antipathy of water and grease. Kimball takes full advantage of this in his backgrounds, and I was entranced with one that simultaneously suggested animal fur, tree bark and cork. Kimball wryly juxtaposes subjects that he hopes will be perceived as metaphors or puzzles. “Two Portraits: One Having Very Large Nostrils” depicts the Roman emperor Constantine and the equally majestic head of a handsome white horse. Using the Indian miniature device of encasing the subject in an elaborate frame-within-a-frame, Kimball creates a jewel-like setting for a jewel-like work of art.
Kimball combines classical and modern imagery to comic effect; Sean Caulfield combines old and new media to create haunting contemporary “landscapes.” Intaglio and mezzotint (incised and roughened metal plates dabbed with ink) produce velvety blacks and subtle gradations of tone that Caulfield uses to marvelous effect in “Diagram #2: Miracle of the Reed.” It consists of two dense, detailed objects—one phallic, the other plant-like—and a lightly drawn limp condom that sit like enigmatic diagrams on a digitally produced set of faintly visible grids. The obsessive quality of the images is dreamlike and somewhat disturbing.
Dennis Kardon depicts women and girls in suggestive and disturbing narratives. Primarily a painter, he makes ink prints that have the transparency of watercolors and the rich vibrant colors of oil paintings. Kardon’s work poses riddles, and one piece titled “Boundary Riddle” depicts a girl sitting in a kiddie pool holding a small mirror. Is she looking at her own reflection or something over her shoulder? Another figure with a garment pooled around the ankles and socks half-on, half-off seems to be gingerly testing the water. Is the title suggesting we create our own boundaries? In “The Neggo Gang,” a black man and an ambiguously aged female (she has breasts, but the hairdo and table lamp suggest a child) are lying in bed. He has his arm around her shoulder in an amorous or protective gesture. They’re looking at something or someone outside the picture frame. She looks apprehensive, but he doesn’t. What are they looking at, and why the different reactions? Kardon has a gift for offbeat, psychological, tense storytelling.
That might also describe the work of David Lynch. Better known for his movies Blue Velvet and Eraserhead and the TV series Twin Peaks, Lynch has a penchant for enigmatic and disturbing imagery that carries into his print work. His untitled collograph (whereby the printing plate is formed by adding textured materials to a solid base) uses wire mesh, a dental mold and paper pulp to create what looks like an expressionistic exploding head whose psychological effect is similar to Munch’s ode to modern angst, “The Scream.”
At the other end of the printmaking spectrum is Donald Farnsworth. He uses new media to repurpose serenely classic imagery. His Inkjet print “Standing figure III, AP 1” has everything but a head. Starting with the fragmentary Greco-Roman Aphrodite/Venus statue familiar to art students everywhere, Farnsworth digitally fills in the missing arms and legs using a live model. The entire figure is transparent, but in a reversal of roles, the statue is enlivened with a palimpsest of richly colored textured surfaces that evoke ancient walls and the ravages of time, while the “real” woman is cooled and immortalized by the use of blue and green tints that suggest an idealized marble.
These selections only scratch the surface of one of the finest exhibits I’ve seen in Las Vegas.
AmplePROOF: Invitational Printmaking Exhibition
**** 1/2
Through December 15, Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery, UNLV
895-3893