Notre Dame College's Art Department Presents:

Surface to Surface: Contemporary Printmaking Exhibit

South Euclid, Ohio-Notre Dame College’s Department of Art will present its first exhibition of the 2008-09 academic year with a print show featuring sixty prints by twelve greater Cleveland printmakers. The exhibit entitled “Surface to Surface” presents a wide range of printing techniques from traditional woodcut and intaglio to experimental monoprint and paper lithography. The show opens with a reception on September 11 from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. in the Performing Arts Center in the college’s Administration Building. The title of the show derives from the definition of printmaking; applying ink to a prepared surface and by applying pressure transferring the ink to a second surface, usually paper. Contemporary printmakers explore a variety of surfaces in this exhibit from traditional printing paper such as Rives and Japanese papers to antique fabric, cloth remnants and recycled tea bag paper. The materials prove to be essential elements in the exhibited prints offering a lively play of surfaces, textures and subtle tonality to the prints. Some printmakers layer paper with additional stitched fibers adding another dimension to more traditional printmaking techniques.

Subject matter and imagery are as varied as the twelve artists. While some artists find inspiration through their physical environment and the natural world, others admit to a fascination with the media, television and the internet finding imagery and content for political and social satire. Claudio Orso-Giacone, a native of Italy now living in Oberlin, uses traditional woodcut techniques to create imagery rich in social commentary. Phyllis Fannin mines the popular culture of childhood memories and her formative years as a dutiful wife and mother with imagery of puppets. Fannin writes, “My puppets represent the ambiguity that a woman can experience in any culture when controlled by other people, issues, beliefs or social mores.”

Jeanne Regan presents imagery of weather and natural world phenomena in a series of silkscreen prints to explore memory and emotion. While Lisa Schonberg creates a personal pictography of signs, symbols, flora and fauna in her vibrant monoprints. Denise Stewart strives to heighten awareness of the proliferation of discarded materials by using recycled and resurrected cast-offs like tea bag fibers and paper remnants. She says, “With a raised consciousness we can all learn to recycle, reuse and renew.”

Each artist was selected to represent the broadening of the definition of contemporary printmaking and each artist will have an opportunity to explain the techniques and subject matter during gallery talk scheduled for September 26 in the Performing Arts Center. The talk and the reception on September 11 are both without charge and open to the general public. The reception is from 5:00 to 7:00 p.m. The gallery talk begins at noon. For more information call Rachel Morris at 216-373-5320 or rmorris@ndc.edu