Notes on Print


In my practice and my teaching, I work with print media and its related technologies. Printmaking is a means of repetition, its technological development spurred by the ever-present need to reproduce and distribute information with increasing immediacy. From its beginnings, print technology has functioned as both a tool for the dissemination of ideas and as a medium for visual expression. Printmaking generally refers to more traditional, art-historical applications of print technologies, while print media suggests a connection with printed matter in the realm of (mass) media and information. Although it may be argued that the primary mode for the distribution of information today is now audio-visual (through televisual and virtual screens), print continues to be a part of our daily landscape, omnipresent in the everyday, from the images on our t-shirts to the milk box in our refrigerator, from the magazines and books on our shelves to the money in our wallets.

A print is a mediated surface, requiring the transference of an image or text from one material (the matrix) to another (the substrate). This transference allows for the possibility of multiples, as the same information impressed onto more than one substrate. Accuracy in duplicating information relies on the ability to exactly and efficiently replicate pictorial statements and texts. As a set of techniques, printmaking continually evolves with the development of reproduction technologies, each claiming greater speed and precision in the transmission of information, while also opening new avenues for artistic experimentation. Printmaking as it is practiced today within the visual arts landscape includes everything from hand-printed, hand-carved woodblocks to digitally generated images, from precious limited-editions of images on specially-produced papers to mass-produced, mechanically printed objects.

With the advent of digital technology, a digital matrix co-exists with the traditional, material matrices (wood, metal, stone, or silk). Where previously the information was to be multiplied had to be on a material surface, printed either by hand or through a press, digital imaging programs allow for a matrix to exist as a file, a virtual code. More intersections are occurring between artistic expressions that previously seemed quite disparate. There is relative ease in transferring information between still-image and time-based software applications. It is possible to realize a digital file in a number of ways: an image can be materialized through outputting onto fabric, paper, film, and other flat surfaces; it can be “printed” onto magnetic tape or “written” onto a metallic disk and realized as a video or a projection; it can be incorporated onto a space on the web and transmitted to individual computer screens.

Notes on process

I am a gatherer of images, a collector, a pack rat. I use strategies of appropriation to subvert seemingly innocuous, humorous, or beautiful images, bringing questions as to their meaning and function. I explore depictions of violence and militarism in news, pop-culture, and children’s media, especially in the ways that militaristic attributes can be portrayed as benign, decorative, and seductive. I work by re-organizing information; borrowing, combining, embellishing and re-making in order to uncover a different reading, removed from its original context.