Wordplay: print/text/image

Co-curated by Edie Overturf and Kevin Haas

Mount Hood Community College, October 25 - November 19, 2022, Gresham, OR

Washington State University Gallery 2, January 12 - February 10, 2023, Pullman, WA

WORDPLAY: Print/Text/Image features artists who use text as an integral element of their creative practice in printmaking and print based media. The work in this exhibit illustrates the charged relationships between images, text, formats and their context. Pulling from popular forms of advertising and display, ordinary written notes, reinterpretations of existing texts, to forceful political statements, these artists play with the familiarity of text to unexpected ends. They create dissonant, satirical, humorous, deadpan, or urgent messages, often through the contrast between what the text says and its means of presentation. The works included in Wordplay require interpretations beyond the simple reading of the text, offering the opportunity to read between the lines.

IFPDA PRINT FAIR SPRING 2022 ONLINE EDITION

March 9 - 16, 2022

www.fineartprintfair.org/2022-spring-booths/stewart-stewart

“In this IFPDA Fair Spring 2022 Online Edition, we are highlighting the work of artists we have represented over many years. Although these are not artists printed or published by Stewart & Stewart, the fine art prints they have created in their own studios are compelling and deserve exposure in this platform. Each of these established artist/printmakers have expanded their craft and concepts to exceptional levels over many years. A much larger selection of their fine art prints can be viewed at StewartStewart.com.”

-Stewart & Stewart

In late 2020, Bolton began publishing an ongoing series of archival pigment print editions on paper made during this disruptive period of post-truth spectacle and alternative facts — an unreal time when the lines between truth vs. fiction and the fake vs. the real have become permanently erased. As in his previous print-based work, these new archival pigment prints are derived from digitally altered iPhone photographs. Selected from his NATURA MORTA series for the IFPDA Spring 2022 Online Edition, these most recent prints begin with in-studio snapshots of still-life tableaus arranged from an assortment of household objects including the handmade, cast-object multiples (stumps, logs, broken branches, boards, bricks, traffic cones, packing peanuts, etc.) that Bolton used in his earlier large-scale, sculptural print installations.

In making this new series of archival pigment prints, Bolton has developed an all-digital working process. After the initial iPhone photos are uploaded, they are then deconstructed and reassembled to make new images that bear an uncanny resemblance to real life. Unlike the photomechanical halftone dot pattern that was used as a mediating screen in Bolton’s earlier screenprints and large-scale banners, these new archival pigment prints display their purely digital origins and means of production through applied layers of glitch filter effects that introduce chance and random RGB shifts, shakes, slices, scan lines, double exposures, and distortions. Resembling printouts of corrupted digital files, these new prints operate more in the realm of the hyper-real, but they retain much of their verisimilitude as photo-based, representational images — a holdover, perhaps, from a time when photography was considered to be an index or a document of reality.