Orange Dot Gallery London: Scared But Fresh

Scared But Fresh, the exhibition at Orange Dot Gallery in London, opens October 6 2010. If you would like to see the event on FaceBook, and join, click here.

The poster for the exhibition is available free for download in a high resolution PDF.  Download the poster.

KEYMAT Collage Studio Works

In August 2010, Keith Donovan and I collaborated on some three dozen collage pieces during a massive thunder and lightening storm that swept the French countryside some three hours south of Paris. We worked throughout the day and into the night, producing this series using a variety of tampons, collage, paint and chance.

Collaborative work is a fascinating and often difficult process.  During the production of these pieces, Keith related the collaborative story of artists Dieter Roth and Richard Hamilton in 1976. An exhibition of the works opened at Galeria Cadaqués.  Each picture was accompanied by a drawn or painted certificate as well as a small image of sausages – meant for the dogs.  Their efforts were dubbed the Rotham Certificates.


I've collaborated with a number of artists in the past including John Himmelfarb, a Chicago-based artist, and the visual poet, John Bennett, the director of Special Collections, Ohio State University. 

The process of handing over an image to another artist sharpens – or dissolves – the ego.  A little section of a piece one grows attached to is sent into the forge to be changed, printed over, obliterated or changed for the benefit of the whole. Sure, there were arguments.

The works, which were helped along by a hungry cat named Vermine, each roughly 25 x 17 cm in size, with a series of five works at 50 x 34 cm.  Pictured here, above are Hard and below, a view of the studio in Le Johet, France. Click on the images to enlarge.

You ––> Me : Silkscreen Print

You ––> Me : Silkscreen print, after collage, 47.5 x 38 cm, three colors, on Arches Rives, 300 gram paper. Edition: 100. All signed and numbered.  20 artist proofs were also produced on a variety of fine art papers, along with several prints on fine art papers in gold, silver, and pink.

The print is a little piece of visual poetry, a sort of lexical love song, a Valentine.

The print was published by Burning Boy Press. Burning Boy Press produces mostly high-quality digital prints in Paris.

The original collage, measures 47.5 x 38 cm, dates from 1999.  Exhibited in Berlin at Galerie Tristesse (2006) and in Paris at Bernard Matussière (2009), the original is available for purchase. [Contact for price].

You ––> Me, 2010, was printed at Michel Hosszù's atelier in Paris in a single day.  Photograph of Michel Hosszù (below) taken in front of his massive silkscreen piece "Grimaces" in his studio in the Bastille section of Paris.

Michel Hosszù designed the screens for printing using three separate colors – two shades of gray and one final black.  Together we moved through the edition, racking up the pieces (photo, right), finally playing with the registration for some of the proofs and off-edition works at the end of the day.  The gold, silver and pink pieces were spray painted prior to printing. Two pieces – one gold, one silver – were printed on A3-sized canvases.

Of note: As a boy I was often working with my father in Queens, New York, producing silkscreens for his retail clients.  The screens – some as large as four meters wide and with as many as 28 colors – were beautiful in themselves.  The variety of paints and lacquers and the teamwork needed to pull the giant squeegee across such a giant screens remain potent images in my mind about the process of reproducing images. There is a gorgeous (although somewhat toxic) perfume involved in silkscreening.

As a teenager, I held many jobs in the silkscreen shop, from stretching the dylon fabric over the frames to spreading out the emulsion, position the frame for printing, then blotting out the tiny holes left after the UV printing lamp hit the acetate positive with the image.  Back then the image silhouettes were often cut out of ruby lith, and not punched out of a laser printer via Photoshop file.  It's a process that combines photography, handiwork, low end technology, but with spectacular results.  Sadly, a great deal of silkscreen production has been taken over by digital printing; and while both are wonderful, there is nothing like the creation of a silkscreen print. It's beautiful and delightfully messy.

The YOU --> ME prints are available through Keep Calm Gallery while a few will also be available at my exhibition SCARED BUT FRESH at Orange Dot Gallery in London on October 6, 2010.  

To purchase a YOU --> ME print, please contact Keep Calm Gallery, by clicking here.

3 PAILS

3 Pails, sculpture.  Boxes, painted white, with three tin pails suspended with twin, 1999-2000.  50 x 39 x 18 cm each.

To purchase, contact me.

PHOTO: RICK ERICKSON.