Jerald Ieans, Untitled Blue # 53, 2003, Collagraph/Relief from Steel Plates on Sommerset, 54 x 58.5", Courtesy of Wildwood Press. |
When the Artist Partners with the Printer and Vice Versa … |
Michele Oka Doner, Untitled, Collagraph/Relief 2007, 48 x 96", Courtesy of Wildwood Press.
Valerie Hammond, Cassiopeia, 2006, Relief and Collagraph on Handmade Paper, 22 x 47", Courtesy of Wildwood Press. |
Faulconer Gallery Wildwood Press was founded by artist and printmaker Maryanne Ellison Simmons in St. Louis, Missouri in 1996. The studio hosts a number of visiting artists each year and is known for its custom papermaking and also its facility to produce prints as large as five feet by ten feet in size. This exhibition will feature prints by 14 artists who have worked at the press since its founding. "If the role of the contemporary artist is to show us something that we don't know or to show us something that we do know in a way that we've never seen, then the role of printer/publisher of contemporary prints is to facilitate the possible. When the collaborative process is working at its best, both the artist and the printer teach each other something new with every project — a principle embraced at Wildwood Press." — Maryanne Ellison Simmons Works in Progress, sums up not only Simmons's approach to her work with individual artists at Wildwood Press, but also the act of printmaking itself. Rather than approach the medium of printmaking as procedural — that is, as sets of established steps by which an artist arrives at a lithograph, an etching, a mezzotint, et cetera — Simmons treats the medium itself as one of ongoing invention, experimentation, without boundaries of definition or category. The goal of Wildwood Press is not to produce typical print editions in which a single image is identically reproduced a desired number of times. Instead, most of the artists who print at Wildwood produce a variable edition in which each print, while clearly related, is unique. Put simply, the goal of Wildwood Press is to expand the idea of what a print can be. Rather than treat the printing press as a tool for mechanical reproduction, Simmons has said she treats it like a pencil, or any tool for making a mark. Her career inspires anyone with delayed dreams of successfully making art. She received a BFA from University of Michigan, then spent the succeeding 20 years raising a family and attending the career of her husband, a professional baseball player. After her children were grown and her husband moved into baseball administration, she entered the graduate printmaking program at Washington University, St. Louis, which, under the direction of printmakers Peter Marcus and Joan Hall, was a leader in experimental printmaking in the country. Through the 1980s and 1990s Marcus and Hall fostered a successful project with professional artists called Collaborative Printmaking Workshop, later called Island Press after a printing press developed by Marcus, capable of producing prints 10 feet by 5 feet. Four years after her graduate degree, Simmons was named Master Printer of Island Press and, the same year, founded Wildwood Press, her own collaborative studio. Wildwood's earliest projects grew out of collaborations at Island Press. Since leaving that program in 2002, Simmons has continued to invite artists from around the world to Wildwood. Most of the artists represented in this exhibition have returned a number of times to continue previous projects, begin new ones, to further explore the possibilities of what a print can be. The exhibition is curated by Dan Strong.
Michael Berkhemer, St. Louis 2005 A 3, 2005, Collagraph/Relief on Sommerset, 85 x 61", Courtesy of Wildwood Press. |
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Mary Judge, Rose Window Series, 2005/2006, Relief from Steel Plates on Handmade Paper, 22 x 22", Courtesy of Wildwood Press. |
