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The “Member Show” at The Ink Shop provides a look at the varied approaches to paper as a medium.
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The “Member Show” at The Ink Shop provides a look at the varied approaches to paper as a medium.
As a contemporary artisanry goes, printmaking finds a natural kinship in the arts of bookmaking and papermaking. Although many fine art printmakers use commercial papers and create frameable pieces for the wall, others explore the physicality of the formed sheet or the possibilities of imagery and text in sequence. Some of the most ambitious make objects that enter the realm of sculpture.
Together, two current local shows offer the public some sense of possibilities. Located downtown, The Ink Shop Printmaking Center is a cooperative studio and gallery with a long-time focus on what might be called the paper arts. Opened recently, their “Member Show 2022” includes prints and books by newer as well as long familiar names.
Up at Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning through this Friday, “Pulp Fiction” surveys current possibilities in papermaking. Featuring undergraduate work alongside pieces by mentor—and Ink Shop associate—Julianne Hunter, the show is roughly presented and tentative but still worth checking out.
“Member Show” offers few if any revelations. Still, the opportunity to see mostly unfamiliar work by some of Ithaca’s most estimable artists is not to be passed up. It is worth highlighting the work of the gallery’s newer members—some showing here for the first time.
Melissa Conroy, a pandemic-era recruit and a lecturer in Human Centered Design at Cornell, is an interdisciplinary artist in the best sense. Her recent work swaps imagery and ideas about process between machine-woven textiles and works on paper. It’s hard to gainsay the exuberance of her two pieces here, which combine bubbles of thinned-down and full throttle color ink with interconnecting lines in black.
Although she has shown at the Shop before, Leslie Ford is still a newcomer by the cooperative’s standards. Like Conroy, Ford works between diverse media—in her case, painting, printmaking, and photography. In three “Study for Curtain Wall” monoprints, she uses pigmented beeswax on Thai paper. Bright iridescent slabs of color—they resemble stacked stone—pop out from the delicate black wrinkled sheets.
Sadly, I was unable to appreciate everything here. A pair of gray-to-black acrylic canvases by brand new member Nathan Dann render occult, pagan-looking figures in a distinctly rudimentary technique. Likewise, I have long tried to appreciate the digitally altered photography of Rebecca Godin, which has a sort of garish, post-Pop affect, applied to what are usually ordinary scenes.
Regular visitors to the Shop will recognize often-excellent work here by many long-time members. Whether the cartoon-like woodcut flora and fauna of Jenny Pope, the fluid expressionistic monotypes of Christa Wolf, or the intricate monochrome color etchings of Judy Barringer, there is a lot here to engage with.
Kumi Korf (a 1977 Cornell M.F.A.) is a bookmaker and an abstract painter-printmaker of unabashedly lyrical sensibility. Here she presents “Modernist Crossing River.” The upright print, relatively small for her, submerges calligraphic lines and Pollock-like spatters in an amorphous, translucent color-space.
New member Laura Rowley presents several traditional books from her Illuminated Press imprint. These are lovely, thoughtful works and the ability to peruse them (gloves are provided) is most welcome.
More interesting, though, in the gallery art context, is new member Melody Wu’s “Being,” an experimental “book” work composed of pages of Japanese paper printed with letterpress text and individually suspended from wire, like sheets on a laundry line.
Given the student self-curation and the Cornell art department’s hectic exhibitions schedule, one may forgive “Pulp Fiction” for lacking the gallery polish of an Ink Shop show. Likewise, even lacking previous familiarity with the work of these B.F.A. artists, it is evident that the work here is tentative and exploratory in nature.
Drawing from the aesthetic of Minimalism and Post-Minimalism, work here is arranged on the wall in serial grids or alternately stacked or scattered. It’s a willfully limiting set of approaches—arguably academic in the pejorative sense. Much of what was made here could be displayed in a high-end gift shop. That we are invited to consider this as avant-garde art ought to inspire questions in the thoughtful viewer.
Julianne Hunter was the Ink Shop’s 2021-2022 Kahn Fellow and currently serves as a visiting critic and print studio manager at Cornell. A show of her work entitled “Ghost Collective” filled the downtown gallery early this year. It includes handmade paper works and innovative cut paper sculpture as well as relatively traditional prints incorporating personal photographs or hand drawing.
Save for the sculpture, all of these elements are present in her varied contributions here. Particularly notable are two large, gridded works: “things left I” and “things left II”—both dating back to her 2017 M.F.A. thesis at SUNY New Paltz. Both are in identical square frames and each features a seven-by-seven grid of small square sheets. We see gradations, ranging from deep blue at the top to white at the bottom.
Anna Laimo’s “No Sleep” is perhaps this show’s most striking piece. Using dyed denim and cotton pulp, the sheets stitched together with bright red thread, the otherwise black-and-white work revels in its varied, abstract texture making.
One hesitates to publicly judge the contributions of undergraduate artists, particularly outside the context of their other work and the pedagogy to which it is a response. My hope would be that the young papermakers of “Fiction” incorporate whatever it is that they have learned here into work that engages traditions of drawing, painting, and sculpture in ways that are more personal and more varied.
“Member Show 2022” through October 28 at The Ink Shop Printmaking Center,330 East State/MLK Jr. Street; open 12-6 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 12-4 p.m. Saturday; www.ink-shop.org.
“Pulp Fiction” through September 9 at the Experimental Gallery, Tjaden Hall, 815 University Ave; open 8 a.m. - 4:30 p.m. Monday-Friday; www.aap.cornell.edu.
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