Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 3, Summer 2001, pp. 245-46.
Abstract
Desmond Rochfort has documented an extraordinary exhibition of printed artworks created in the Canadian West over the past twenty-five years. His perceptive essay in the catalogue, "Printmaking, Technologies and the Culture of the Reproducible Image," discusses the relationship between the tradition of the hand-pulled, limited edition prints of the past five hundred years and the novel technologies of the pixilated, global "Image Culture" employing "multi-reproducible digital imaging" computers.
The exhibition contains the work of a cross section of contemporary artists: twenty-five graduate students, two printmaking technicians, and three printmaking faculty from the University of Alberta. The wide variety of prints, so beautifully documented here, communicate an intense motivation to explore, to examine, to probe, to express the materials and processes of printmaking by combining the mechanical means of production, using photographic processes and computer imaging, with the physical manipulation of materials. Photography and drawing exist in symbiosis with printmaking at the University in Alberta. The formal issues of size and scale in printmaking, foreign to the discipline in the past, are given center stage in these prints. Technical processes are mixed as a matter of course, but craftsmanship is never sacrificed.
The catalogue's second essay, Lawrence Smith's "Printmaking in Three Continents: A Question of Horizons," poses serious questions regarding the relevancy of printmaking as an art form. These the reader can begin answering immediately by examining the exhibition's prints reproduced in the volume. The prejudice printmaking is subject to in the art world is one of the key issues Smith addresses.
The print artists working at the University of Alberta printmaking studios since the early 1970s are led by Walter Jule, who studied with Glen Alps at the University of Washington in Seattle. Together with Lyndal Osborne, a student of Jack Damier at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and Elizabeth Ingram from Toronto, Jule has established an educational and research center of international importance. The level of accomplishment within the printmaking field and the education of print makers at the University of Alberta are unparalleled. As print artists working in Edmonton have continually pushed boundaries in contemporary printmaking and challenged printmaking traditions, they have enhanced the potential of the medium itself. These significant contributions have gone largely unnoticed in the United States, although widely acknowledged in Europe and Japan.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln