James Nares back @ Durham Press

James Nares, long-time Durham Press friend and collaborator , returned to the studio recently to complete work on his new screenprint, THUMP. This new edition is the 13th print James has created at Durham Press, and he and JP (the master printer here) continue to push the dynamic dimensionality of his painted brushstrokes into amazing, rich, vibrant screenprinted editions. When asked recently about his experience of working at Durham Press and with JP on this process, James said:

Working at Durham Press is really a pleasure. JP’s knowledge of, and experience with the silkscreening process is second to none, and working with him is a collaboration, as with another artist. He has come up with an ingenious method to create screen prints of my brush strokes which have all the body and tones of an actual, painted brush stroke, but without the use of half-tone…

For those maybe unfamiliar with the screenprinting process, creating a halftone is the process of turning all the tone in an image into various sized and spaced dots in order to create the tonal variation. This allows all of the tone to be printed at once and is what you are looking at when you see a black and white photo printed in the newspaper, for example. What gives James’ prints the fluidity, the subtle shift in tone and the overall richness of color is that is is not printed as a halftone, but is rather broken down into 10-15 layers of varied tone and color and then rebuilt, through printing each layer one on top of the other. It is a complicated process, but creates a seamlessness in the color and tonal shifts that would not be possible otherwise.

To see THUMP as well as some of the other work James has produced with Durham Press, please visit our booth at the IFPDA Print Fair in New York City. The fair is held at the Park Avenue Armory and runs from November 5th – November 8th, 2009.

Also, James film Rome in ‘78 is currently being shown at MOMA as part of the film exhibition, Looking at Music: Side 2. The next screening will be on Saturday, November 28th at 7:30 p.m. The film, according to the MOMA website, is “a narrative about the Roman emperor Caligula set in a shabby Manhattan apartment, proposes an analogy between ancient Rome and modern America as cultural empires. The image below is a still from the film.

Alison Elizabeth Taylor @ James Cohan Gallery

This Thursday, May 22nd, Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s exhibition, New Works, will also 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)

Polly Apfelbaum Production in the Studio

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

New Durham Press prints @ Marty Walker Gallery

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.

Tom Slaughter’s Obama 2008 Posters

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

Ray Charles White @ Senior & Shopmaker Gallery

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

Ray Charles White @ Senior & Shopmaker Gallery

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

INK Miami 2007

This week we will be heading to the INK Miami Art Fair in Miami Beach, Florida. This year is the second year of INK, and if last year’s fair is any indication, it is going to be an amazing week. Like last year, the fair will be held at the Suites of Dorchester located at 1850 Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. We will be in Suite #156 on the first floor, so please stop in and visit us. The fair runs from Wednesday, December 5th to Sunday, December 9th and the hours of the fair are: 12 p.m to 6 p.m on Wednesday, 10 a.m to 7 p.m on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m to 3 p.m on Sunday. Below are several photos from our suite at the 2006 INK Miami fair.

Ray Charles White has been out to the Press quite a bit lately, hammering out ideas for several new editions and finalizing the details on works already in progress. Much of this work will debut at Ray’s show at the Senior & Shopmaker Gallery in February. In the photos below, you can see the preliminary images of an as-yet-untitled diptych.

JP working on the composition of a new as-yet-untitled Ray Charles White diptych

IFPDA New York Print Fair

It has been two weeks since the IFPDA Print Fair in New York, and things have been non-stop around Durham Press ever since. This year’s fair was the most successful one Durham Press has ever been a part of, and everyone around here is trying to keep up with all of the people interested in the new editions we debuted this year. Throughout the weekend, our booth saw a steady stream of visitors from all corners of the artworld and beyond, and friends and Durham Press artists, Lisa Stefanelli, Polly Apfelbaum, Emil Lukas, Tom Slaughter, Lydia Dona and Ray Charles White all came by to show their support. In the next couple of weeks, we will be preparing for INK Miami, but for now here are some photos from this year’s amazing IFPDA New York Print Fair. If you are ever in the city and need a recommendation for hotel, restaurant or something to do, please check out My Urban Sherpa, our friend Alison Curry’s online guide to New York City.

Ann and JP discussing the work with visitors to our booth

Exterior shot of our booth

JP discussing work with a visitor to the booth

IFPDA New York Print Fair

This week we will be heading to the IFPDA New York Print Fair, where we will debut many of the new editions you can see in progress below. The Print Fair is unique among the world’s major art fairs for its focus on fine prints from all periods. This year the fair runs from November 1, 2007 to November 4, 2007, with an opening night reception on October 31st from 5:00pm to 9:30pm. We are very excited about the new work we will have to show, and we’re looking forward to seeing the work the other exhibitors have on display.

In the photo below, you can see our space at the 2006 New York Print Fair. From left to right, the work hanging in the booth is Beatriz Milhazes’ Summer Night, John Giorno’s Welcoming the Flowers, Beatriz Milhazes’ Fig and Delancey Street by Ray Charles White.

At this year’s fair, we will be launching new editions by Alison Elizabeth Taylor, Roland Fischer, Polly Apfelbaum, James Nares and Ray Charles White, as well as debuting new monoprints by Polly Apfelbaum and Emil Lukas. We will also have on hand a number of amazing older works from our inventory. Please join us at the Fair located at The Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue at 67th Street. The open hours are 12:00 pm to 7:00 pm on Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm on Sunday.