Thinking Big: Berkeley City College Printmakers at Gualala Art Center
March 14 - April 5, 2009
Exhibitions
Matthew Silverberg, CuratorThinking Big: Berkeley City College PrintmakersGualala Arts will have a free exhibit, “Thinking Big: Berkeley City College Printmakers” from the opening March 14 at 5:00 p.m. through April 6. The exhibit demonstrates the newest efforts in producing digital imagery on a large scale. The twenty artists in this group are evolving a culture and style of digital printmaking that works in four overlapping aesthetic areas: abstraction, hyper-realism, figurative art and neo-surrealism. Several artists are branching out into new forms of digital abstraction using input sources such as layered vector designs (algorithm-based), distorted and over-lapped photography, inclusion of scanned objects and patterns, and the development of new spaces derived from the lighting and modeling of 3D rendering programs. Other artists use high-resolution photography to make “hyper-realistic” imagery of an illusionary nature, making prints that are beyond what is real because they have been so precisely edited. Still other printmakers are exploring figurative work—adapting recognizable subject matter but ‘compositing’ it as if in digital collages: combining and mixing pictorial elements from drawings, paintings and appropriated sources (web, text, fonts, famous images) and engendering new figures in new environments. The final group of artists is working in a “neo-surrealistic” style: borrowing a variety of inputs to create worlds that are dreamy, revelatory and expressive of imagination and levels of underlying consciousness. Perhaps one of the most interesting aspects of this group is that most members work across these four interrelated styles. Another aspect of “Thinking Big: Berkeley City College Printmakers” is that images are produced on a variety of output media—and always at a large scale. Group members produce digital imagery as quilts, on aluminum sheets, as big canvases on stretcher bars, on mylar panels, in “Cornell Boxes” and other “sculptural” environments, and even on paper. In fact paper choices range from traditional matte printing on treated watercolor and rice papers to glossy photographic finishes to use of recycled and treated papers. Several artists use their printmaking imagery in creating other work including motion graphics, web art projects, and other projected artwork. A final component of this exhibition is the degree of reflection about art history and pertinent precedents both historic and contemporary: collagists, surrealists, conceptualists, abstractionists, traditional photography, and of course digital multimedia arts. Members of this group have shown recently at (in 2008) Sea Ranch, the San Pablo Civic Center Gallery, the Alameda Art Museum, the June Steingart Gallery (Laney College, Oakland), Kala and the SFMOMA Artists Gallery. Various group members have also shown (since 2006‚ at the Fetterley Gallery (Vallejo), Eddie Rhodes Gallery (Contra Costa College), the Addison Street Windows Gallery (Berkeley) and the Alameda Museum. Many group members produce art in other media as well including traditional photography, oil painting, web art, fabric art and motion graphics. List of ArtistsFlorian Charreard |
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