Carleton College’s New Art Gallery Exhibit Showcases Printmaking from Around the Pacific Rim

The Carleton College Art Gallery will kick-off its fall season with an exhibition showcasing fine art prints created by artists from Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, and Hawaii. Prints Around the Pacific Rim, running from September 17 to November 17, 2010, celebrates the varied method of printmakers, and highlights artistic exchange between cultures across the wide Pacific. Prints Around the Pacific Rim is also one of many fall events coinciding with the Mid America Print Council Conference, Old World/New World, taking place in the Twin Cities in mid-October.

“Printmaking, producing multiple and portable copies of a single image, is an ideal medium for artistic exchange,” says Laurel Bradley, director of exhibitions and Carleton College curator. “The seven artists featured in the exhibit match printmaking techniques to subjects ranging from indigenous moral tales to meditations on visual fact and fiction, and from science-art connections to experiential cartography.”

John Pule of New Zealand, and Judy Watson and Dennis Nona of Australia, draw from indigenous cultural backgrounds. Pule invokes tapa cloth, a traditional ceremonial bark cloth, in prints mixing cryptic mythological and historical symbols. Nona presents large linocuts and smaller etchings visualizing folk tales and folk remedies from his northeastern Australian island home. Watson premiers a portfolio of color etchings which respond to scientific research on the Heron Island ecosystem off the east coast of Australia. 

The artists featured in Prints Around the Pacific Rim, have extensive academic training and global exhibition records. Sean Caulfield of Canada, using mixed printmaking methods, ponders the mysteries of biotechnology in recent collaborative projects. His wife, Akiko Taniguchi, of Canada and Japan, composes a universe of abstract forms infused with her own personal experience of nature. Japanese artist Katsutoshi Yuasa transforms photographic landscape images into meditations on light and perception through vigorous woodcut prints. Charles Cohan, based in Hawaii, “maps” the terrain of significant North American mountain peaks through sublimely subtle screenprints.

Thursday, September 23, the Art Gallery will celebrate Prints Around the Pacific Rim with an evening lecture and reception. One of the exhibit’s featured artists, Sean Caulfield, who is also associate professor of printmaking and drawing at the University of Alberta, will present “Printmaking: Across Disciplines, Between Cultures” in the Boliou Hall Auditorium, followed by the reception in the Art Gallery from 8:30 until 10 p.m.

An additional lecture, “Exchanges: Printmaking around the Pacific Rim,” will be presented on Wednesday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. in the Boliou Hall Auditorium by another featured artist, Charles Cohan, who serves as associate professor and printmaking program chair at the University of Hawaii. Both lectures are co-sponsored by the Carleton College Christopher U. Light Lectureship in the Arts. Admission to the Carleton College Art Gallery is free and open to the public.

The Mid America Print Council, an organization that promotes awareness and appreciation of original printmaking through conferences, workshops, and exhibitions, will host its annual conference in the Twin Cities from Oct. 13 through 16. Entitled Old World/New World, this year’s conference will explore the mixture of practices, cultures, and mindsets that facilitate the constant re-invention of printmaking as a communication tool, as well as highlight the Twin Cities’ unique and rich print community. On Sunday, October 17, conference participants may opt to travel to Northfield to visit print exhibitions at Carleton and St Olaf College. In addition to Prints Around the Pacific Rim in the Art Gallery, Carleton exhibitions will include Prints from the Iowa Tradition in the Boliou Hall of Art, and Al-Mutanabbi Street Project Broadsides and Twenty Views of Dundas at the Gould Library. 

The Carleton College Art Gallery is located in the lower level of the Music and Drama Center, near First and Winona Streets in Northfield. For gallery hours, call (507) 222-4469 or visit www.carleton.edu/campus/gallery. For additional information about the exhibit and accompanying lectures, contact Laurel Bradley at (507) 222-4342.

Image credit:

"Heron Island Suite #4" by Judy Watson (Australia)

2009-10

etching with screenprint