Print exhibit leaves pale mark

Author: Lauren Smith

Students in Assistant Professor of Studio Art Hedya Klein's printmaking course, ART 0316, are displaying their intaglio prints in the Johnson Memorial Building's Pit Space. The prints will be on exhibit until April 14. The exhibit, sponsored by the Program in Studio Art, is free and open to the public.

The prints push the traditional intaglio technique to a new level through their unique approach to technical and conceptual issues, including narrative technique. Each student in the class created six panels of prints. Each panel is a component of a story being told through images. The images are incredibly detailed, though they do not always portray realistic scenes. The majority of the prints depict people, or some form of creature, participating in an event.

The assignment behind the prints in the exhibit was to comment on "an aspect of pop culture that interests the student whether it is on a personal or impersonal level," said Klein. "The students, in this first semester, are working up to their final project which is to create a comic strip. Here, they are dealing with the idea of creating pictographs with six plates, with each plate using a new technique. [Learning technique] is our primary goal for the first half of the semester." Klein added, "Students did not have to tell a narrative in their prints, but many chose to do so. The only requirement for the prints was to make some comment on how pop culture infiltrates our world."

One of the strongest pieces in the exhibit, by Jake Whitcomb '06, is of a vehicle resembling a Hummer. The vehicle approaches a stoplight in the first panel. In the next, it is presumably crashing into something, as the lines on the print depict utter chaos. The following panels show differing stages of the vehicle's destruction, with the roof and tailpipes smoking. The final scene is of a portion of the vehicle's cracked bumper, smoking tailpipe and a flat tire. The prints were not only very well drawn, but they incorporate humor into an exhibit that is generally lacking just that. The composition of each panel is excellent, the well-used space adds to the humor and fast pace of the sequence of scenes.

The best prints in the show are the ones that make strong statements of line and strong contrast. Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, most of the prints are so lightly drawn with barely discernable lines that the viewer has a difficult time making out the image. Also, what the viewer can make out as an image is not always nice to look at. Though a well-thought out conceptual idea seemed to be behind each student's panel of scenes, the drawing is poorly done in most pieces.

To the students' credit, the exhibit would have been much better received were it not so poorly displayed in a particularly dismal area of the Johnson Building. The prints, simply tacked to the wall, are not given the recognition they deserve. The exhibit was also weakened by the fact that many of the students did not sign their pieces.

Intaglio printmaking is a technique in which the image is incised into a surface, usually copper or zinc plates. Incisions are created by etching, engraving, dry point, or mezzotint. To print an intaglio plate, the surface of the plate is covered in ink, and then rubbed with cloth or newspaper to remove the ink. The only ink remaining is in the engraving. A damp piece of printing paper is placed on the top of the plate, and then both are pulled through a printing press, where the pressure from the press causes the print to be transferred.