D U R H A M P R E S S B L O G

Next Thursday, May 22nd, Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s exhibition, New Works, will open at James Cohan Gallery in New York City. The show runs from May 22 - June 21, 2008 and will include Alison’s recent collaboration with Durham Press, Idylls, alongside her stunning wood veneer inlay pieces (see image below). The James Cohan website features the following press release for the exhibition:

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, whose marquetry, or wood-inlay, figurative works reveal the hidden histories of everyday lives. In her use of wood veneer, Taylor subverts the material’s customary use as a decorative element used to convey a sense of wealth, power, and elite social status. Taylor’s oblique narratives refer to mainstream American culture and interests— large vehicles, sex, guns, video games, religion, hunting and the military—that seem to predominate. Limited to a palette of natural woods, she innovates by using the grain and tone of the veneer to explore issues of space, surface, line, color, and form. Her paintings uniquely transgress the traditional distinction between craft and high art.

The centerpiece of Taylor’s exhibition is a free-standing architectural installation in Gallery Three entitled Room. Like the trompe l’oeil masterpiece known as the Duke of Urbino’s Studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio (1479-1482), now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the contents but not the occupant of Room are depicted in detailed wooden marquetry panels. During the Italian Renaissance, patrons commissioned large intarsia projects, like the Gubbio Studiolo, as expressions of their wealth and power to confirm their positions in society by illustrating their educated tastes—the images amounting to an idealized autobiography. In contrast, Taylor’s Room does not exalt her subject. In this architectural portrait, Taylor examines the habitat and possessions of its resident, who reveals himself to be a character living on the edge of society.

The Room is a trove of objects fascinating and mundane: a US Army helmet from Vietnam rests in a display case with a handgun; a deer hoof is mounted on a horseshoe; a lamp has been fashioned of a hollowed-out grenade; the room is inhabited by animals taxidermied or carved. Many of the objects have price tags attached, indicating the multiple uses of the space: a store, a workshop, and a habitation. An open window hints that the occupant may have escaped. The east-facing window looks out onto a stretch of land decimated by the incursion of tract-homes which threaten to crowd Room out of existence. Through the opposite window is rocky, virgin desert. There, beauty and entropy entwine, contrasting with the ordered monotony of development. As the rural desert concedes to suburban planning, it becomes what the subject was trying to escape: over-crowded, over-priced and stifling. The old bargain he struck with the desert—freedom for isolation —has been reneged.

Single-panel works installed in the front galleries further chronicle those who are driven by their desire to escape society and who ultimately realize the impossibility of finding respite. In Hank (2007), a shabbily dressed man peddles a bicycle up a mountain incline, and his worried glance over his shoulder suggests that he is fleeing some danger. Slab City (2007) pictures another kind of trouble —two characters, one entirely nude, the other dishevelled, ignore what looks to be a person submerged and drowning in an adjacent pond. Taylor’s subjects are society’s dropouts whose surroundings—a geodesic dome or a VW bus—suggest that they fled to the West in search of the refuge of an alternative lifestyle. Despite their utopian dreams, her characters find themselves in predicaments that are far from enlightened. At least, this is what we imagine; Taylor masterfully piques viewers’ interest while leaving many questions unanswered.

A native of Las Vegas, Alison Elizabeth Taylor is concerned with the changing desert and environmental sustainability. This is Taylor’s second exhibition at James Cohan Gallery. Taylor graduated with an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2005. She has been featured in group exhibitions such as 96 Gillespie’s Dirty Pigeons (2005, London); Other America at Exit Art (2005, New York); Truly She is None Other at New Image Art Gallery (2006, Los Angeles); and The Powder Room at Track 16 Gallery (2007, Los Angeles).

For more information, please visit www.jamescohan.com

Hank by Alison Elizabeth Taylor (image courtesy of James Cohan Gallery)

This weekend James Nares will be screening a number of his films at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City (32 Second Avenue between 1st and 2nd Streets). The Anthology Film Archives provides the following press release for the program:

James Nares is known primarily as a painter. His reputation in film rests mainly with ROME ‘78, NO JAPS AT MY FUNERAL and WAITING FOR THE WIND, three rarely-screened movies he made between 1978 and 1982, when he was associated with what came to be known as the No Wave movement in New York. However, he was making films before that period, and has continued to make them ever since. Presented here is a selection of 34 films (many in brand-new prints) made from 1975 to 2007, only seven of which have ever been screened. All the movies from 1975 and 1976 were missing and presumed lost until a number of them were discovered in deep storage in 2007. Nares has spent the past year revisiting and restoring all this work, and in the case of one, THE LIGHTHOUSE, finishing a movie which had been lying in rough-edit form for 17 years. Program 7, on Thursday, May 22, will be followed by a conversation between Nares and writer Luc Sante (LOW LIFE)!

Each night a different selection of films will be screened, and the full schedule can be seen here. For more information, please visit www.anthologyfilmarchives.org.

For the last couple of weeks, the studio crew has been working hard to finish production on the last of our new editions–Polly Apfelbaum’s Wood Street and Lover’s Leap 13. Both editions required a bit of innovation and a constructed jig in order to print the perfect edition, and it has been an interesting process to see these prints being produced. Below are a handful of images taken while the studio crew has been been working on these two unique new editions.

Jason, Kyle and Jeremy inking blocks prior to placing them in the jig seen in the foreground

Jason making notes on the ink colors while Kyle and Jeremy place inked blocks into the jig

Jeremy and Kyle placing inked blocks into the jig

Inked blocks in the jig

Once the jig is filled with the appropriate blocks, the entire set up is placed into the hydraulic press, and all of the blocks are pressed into handmade sheets of Japanese paper. The end result is a finished Lover’s Leap 13 print, as seen below.

Colors rolled out for Polly Apfelbaum’s Wood Street (Gray)

Chris placing the inked blocks into the custom-made jig

Chris locking the jig up preparing it to be printed

Reveal of one of the Wood Street (Gray) prints

The finished Wood Street portfolio

Curator Leslie Wayne chatting in front of Lydia Dona’s Portraits & Speed…

We recently received installation images from the exhibition Revision, Reiteration, Recombination: Process and the Contemporary Print curated by Leslie Wayne. The show featured Durham Press prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Lydia Dona and Leslie Wayne among others and traveled to two separate venues. The included images were taken from the installation at the College of Visual Arts in Minneapolis where JP joined Leslie and another invited guest in a roundtable discussion. By all accounts, the exhibition was a success and may travel to other venues later next year.

Polly Apfelbaum’s Baby Love 84 (left) among other works in the exhibition

Image of the installation including works by Leslie Wayne (center right) and Lydia Dona (right)

Tonight marks the opening of Recent Prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares and Alison Elizabeth Taylor at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas. All of the prints in the show are recent projects completed at Durham Press, and for Roland Fischer’s Facades on Paper III, James Nares’ GO and Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Idylls, this is the first time they will have ever been exhibited outside of the print fairs. The show runs from March 29th to May 3rd, 2008 with an opening reception tonight, March 29th, from 5-8 pm. For more information, please visit www.martywalkergallery.com and click on “Current Exhibition.”

The Marty Walker Gallery website features the following press release for the show:

Marty Walker Gallery presents recent prints from Durham Press. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Durham Press has earned a reputation for impeccable quality among artists, dealers and curators worldwide. A fine art print publisher based in a turn-of-the century schoolhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the Press has published and produced over one hundred limited edition contemporary prints with influential artists from around the world. Its projects have been placed with major museums and contemporary art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Press is a member of the IFPDA. This exhibition features extraordinary new prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor.

Polly Apfelbaum’s new multicolor wood-block prints recall the artist’s marker on silk-rayon velvet wall pieces, part Josef Albers, part Gene Davis, with the same pop sensibility that informed her flower series. The woodblock monoprint in the exhibit consists of a composition of stripes featuring a spectrum of up to eighty colors. Apfelbaum’s ubiquitous stripes simultaneously address color theory, fashion, pop culture, and rhythm, revealing themselves as both cliché yet iconic. Apfelbaum’s work is included in numerous museum collections, including the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and Magasin 3 Stockholm, Sweden.

Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes embraces motifs that might become kitschy in less skilled hands. Heavily influenced by both the botanical gardens outside her studio and her sister’s dance company, the flirtatious colors and festive patterns are steeped in carnivalesque rhythms and landscape of her native Brazil. Milhazes has exhibited extensively, showing at the 2006 Shanghai Biennial and the 2004 Venice Biennale. Milhazes has work included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanzawa, Japan, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia Madrid, Spain.

For James Nares, painting is a sort of ritual process. A finished work, comprised of a single “perfect” brushstroke, in some ways relates to Asian calligraphy. However, unlike working with ink on paper, open to the caprices of chance, Nares reworks canvases over and over until a precise gesture appears capturing the perfect brush stroke. Born in England, Nares has worked and lived in New York since 1974. Nares work is included in many collections, including Albright Knox Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

German photographer Roland Fischer photographs sections of buildings’ façades in such a way as to flatten their geometry and create two-dimensional abstract compositions that are simple and starkly beautiful. Closely cropped buildings allude to both abstract painting and portraiture, purposefully concealing the context and size of large buildings in order emphasize their unique decorative and geometric patterns. Work by Fischer is included in collections, such as the Margulies Family Collection, Merrill Lynch London, Microsoft, and Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid, among others.

And in the OTHER GALLERY, recent Columbia graduate, Alison Elizabeth Taylor masterfully works ambiguous scenes of small-town adolescent angst in a suite of screenprints published by Durham Press making their exhibition debut at Marty Walker Gallery. In this suite, Taylor continues to portray suburban small-town scenes of mischief, boredom, and awkwardness, among barren landscapes and tacky interiors. Taylor’s narratives are sharp social critiques displaying the banal and the abject in her dystopic vision of modern life. Taylor’s mundane landscapes are executed in the antiquated medium of marquetry (wood veneer inlay), for a solo exhibit at James Cohan Gallery, May 22 -June 21st, 2008.

Next month, Polly Apfelbaum is going to be part of a group exhibition at the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The exhibition, titled Hair of the Dog, features Polly’s work alongside that of AES+F, Ann Gaziano, Rebecca Holland, Jason Manly, Philip Sanderson and Brandon Soder. The exhibition runs from April 5th through May 25th, 2008, with an opening reception on April 5th from 5 to 7 pm. For more information, please visit the Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe website here.

According to the Center for Contemporary Arts website:

The exhibition Hair of the Dog investigates the vocabulary, limitations, and mythology of the medium of painting through modern art history and into the 21st century. The artists and their works do not lend themselves to conclusions; rather, the aim is to provoke critical considerations of how painting functions as art in our culture. None of the artists in the exhibition will apply pigment to canvas in the traditional manner; some will not use paint at all. Portraiture, landscape, and narrative are some of the structures within the language of painting to be engaged. Featuring the work of AES+F, Polly Apfelbaum, Ann Gaziano, Rebecca Holland, Jason Manly, Philip Sanderson, & Brandon Soder; mediums include needlepoint, video, installation, photography, and cast sugar.

Durham Press artist and friend Tom Slaughter recently completed a series of posters in support of the Barack Obama 2008 Presidential Campaign. The posters, printed at Durham Press, come in both a reddish-orange and a blue and feature Tom’s signature papercut-style graphic elements. For more information, please visit Tom’s website at www.tomslaughter.com and click under “Obama Prints.”

The Obama 2008 posters in production at Durham Press

Jason holding one of Tom Slaughter’s untrimmed Obama 2008 posters

Fuel Injection by Lydia Dona

Lydia Dona’s exhibition, From Heat to Sub-Zero, is now on display at Michael Steinberg Fine Art in New York City. The show features a combination of Lydia’s paintings and prints, including Fuel Injection made in collaboration with Durham Press. The show runs from March 21st through April 26th, 2008. For more information, please visit www.michaelsteinbergfineart.com.

From the Michael Steinberg Fine Art website:

Michael Steinberg Fine Art is pleased to present “From Heat To Sub-Zero”, an exhibition of new works by Lydia Dona. Featured in the exhibition is the monumental triptych from which the show derives its name. Completed in 2008, this painting offers an opportunity to understand the interplay between the artist’s recent paintings and her graphic work. Accompanying the painting are three large format etchings published by Poligrafa of Barcelona, Spain, as well as a silkscreen print issued by Durham Press of Durham, Pennsylvania. Seen in combination, the influence of the graphics on Dona’s painting becomes apparent.

The exploration of urban environment, the encroachment of technology on the human body and the organic enmeshments with the chemical changes surrounding them has been a repetitive development and preoccupation in Dona’s approach to abstraction.

The cinematic devices of sequence, framing, cutting and variety of lightings, have infiltrated their way into the monumentality so this triptych is constructed between breaks, meeting points, and the complexity of transformation.

The introduction of silver metallic paint, copper and oxide copper play a new role in the idea of chemical change as well as a sculptural and photographic impact into the canvas. The utilization of auto car repairs, tubes, and diagrams is constructing and evolving into lines that created a new relationship and a challenging despair between environments sunk into mass.

The linear elements move and entangle themselves creating a new context with the line, marks, borders, and cityscapes. The super charged content and motion, the visual charge of heavy metal and light metal decreases in temperatures to the edge of the self-elimination and the potent frames of experimentation.

Lydia Dona lives and works in New York City. Well known both nationally and internationally, Dona’s work has been featured in important museum exhibitions such as the 1991 Corcoran Biennial in Washington, D.C., and From Albers to Paik, Works from the Daimler Chrysler Collection, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, in 1999. Recent group shows include Officina America at the galleria D’arte Moderna Bologna, Italy, in 2002, and About Painting at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, New York, in 2004. Between 1995 and 1997, a survey show of her work from 1989 – 1995 traveled in the United States and Canada. Lydia Dona’s work is included in numerous significant collections, both public and private.

Last week, the whole Durham Press staff attended the opening for Ray Charles White’s Recent Work exhibition at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery. A good time was had by all, and the show looked amazing. Below are some installation shots from the exhibition. All pieces in the show are recent collaborations with Durham Press.

Into the Woods by Ray Charles White

Refraction and Treeline 1

Reading the Water

Parallax

Treeline 2

Into the Woods and Fractal Studies

Next Wednesday, February 13th, 2008, will mark the opening of Ray Charles White’s exhibition, Recent Work, at Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in New York City. The shows runs from February 13 - March 29th, 2008, with the opening on the 13th from 6-8 pm. All works in the exhibition are recent collaborations with Durham Press, and the studio crew have been working tirelessly to get the incredible new works ready for the show.

The Senior & Shopmaker website features the following press release for Recent Work:

Senior & Shopmaker Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new photographic works by photographer Ray Charles White. The artist, born in Toronto in 1961, employs “straight photography” skills which he honed under the tutelage of Ansel Adams, in combination with computer-based digital technology and screenprinting techniques employed by his long-time collaborator, Jean Paul Russell at Durham Press in Durham, Pennsylvania where these works are fabricated. The resulting images-water surfaces, tree branches, shards of cracked ice-are silkscreened onto anodized aluminum panels producing an effect at once simple and infinitely detailed.

Shooting directly from nature, White captures the tension, tranquility, and emotional potential of water, in all its forms. Like artists such as Vija Celmins, Roni Horn, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, White is fascinated by the potential for pure abstraction inherent in patterns found in water surfaces. By tightly cropping his images and arranging them in minimalist grids, the artist eliminates references to specific landscapes. The reflectivity afforded by their aluminum substrate animates his subjects and further separates them from the static nature of traditional landscape photography. In his essay, Enigma of the Earth, Vincent Katz describes the tension in White’s work between nature and technology: “… there is a deeper look, to the materials and means of transference, and the mechanical nature of what we are looking at takes precedence. White takes a salutary distance from Warhol’s undeniable influence, taking a more cautious approach, toeing a line between nature and technology.”

Below are images of the pieces in Recent Work in production. The entire Durham Press crew will be in attendance at the opening, and it should be an amazing night. For more information, please visit the Senior and Shopmaker website here.

Ray and Jason discussing one of the screens Jason is preparing to print

Refraction by Ray Charles White, a new piece to be included in the show

Chris and Jackie cleaning one of the new screens

another new piece, titled Parallax, to be included in the show

Chris and Jason look over one of the just-printed panels for the large-scale piece tentatively titled Into the Woods

The unique set of Welcoming the Flowers paintings

John Giorno’s Welcoming the Flowers prints were recently highlighted in the Art on Paper 4th Annual New Prints review. The prints were also featured in an exhibition at Michael Berger Gallery in Pittsburgh, titled Words & Music. The show also included works by Cheonae Kim, Ken Aptekar, William Anastasi, Monique Prieto and Jane Callister.

John Giorno’s Welcoming the Flowers installed at Michael Berger Gallery in Pittsburgh

Musical performance during the exhibition Words & Music. John Giorno’s Welcoming the Flowers are installed in the background.

John will also be featured in the upcoming exhibition Traces Du Sacre at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The show runs from May 7th - August 11th, 2008 and then travels to Munich in September. John will be a showing his We Gave a Party for the Gods…painting that he did in collaboration with Durham Press as well as perfoming at the opening. For more information, visit the Centre Pompidou website here.

John Giorno’s We Gave A Party for the Gods print done in collaboration with Durham Press