Concordia's Thursday Report

Vol. 30, No.11

March 03, 2005

 

Mastering the art of the print

By Lina Shoumarova

With poet Anne Carson, Christopher Armijo created a book of her unpublished poems and drawings. Kept in a felt pouch with a silver lining, the book, called Gnosticisms, was showcased at the fall exhibition in New York's International Print Center. “We are in the process of placing it in library collections around the world,” Judy Garfin said.With poet Anne Carson, Christopher Armijo created a book of her unpublished poems and drawings. Kept in a felt pouch with a silver lining, the book, called Gnosticisms, was showcased at the fall exhibition in New York's International Print Center. “We are in the process of placing it in library collections around the world,” Judy Garfin said.

With poet Anne Carson, Christopher Armijo created a book of her unpublished poems and drawings. Kept in a felt pouch with a silver lining, the book, called Gnosticisms, was showcased at the fall exhibition in New York's International Print Center. “We are in the process of placing it in library collections around the world,” Judy Garfin said.
 

Some unconventional and quite successful art works have come out of the Print Media's Master Printer Project. Only two years old, this initiative in the Faculty of Fine Arts has produced high-quality artistic collaborations and achieved recognition both at home and in the United States. As a result, it has increased the vibrant profile of the Faculty of Fine Arts.

The project is part of the Innovative Print Centre, founded in 2003 as a place where master printers, artists and students could work closely together. In such a way, the students will benefit the most by being exposed to professional print approaches, explained Judy Garfin, a professor in the Print Media division who has been involved in the Centre from its inception.

The project's first year and a half proved to be very fruitful. Under the guidance of Christopher Armijo, a Rhode Island School of Design graduate with a master printer training from the Tamarind Lithography Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the program attracted famous names from the world of visual arts, such as Betty Goodwin, Rober Racine, Ed Pien and Janet Werner.

Based on these artists' drawings, sophisticated and delicate prints were made by Armijo and his team of printer apprentices in close collaboration with the artists themselves. A few of the prints can be seen in a glass case outside of the Printing Studios on the 4th floor of the Visual Arts building.

Very well received was the sculptural book that Christopher Armijo created along with Governor General's Award winner Barbara Steinman. Based on Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus, the book is composed of 75 sheets with a thin red edging. It is housed in a box, where the sheets are placed on a slant so that their edges are visible.

There are only five copies of this artwork, one of which was selected for the McGill University Rare Book Collection and "another was recently purchased by the Musée des Beaux Arts," Garfin said.

A variety of techniques are applied in the creation of print art. Texts or drawings are digitalized and then exposed onto litho plates. For some of the works, like Rober Racine's prints, the method of traditional lithography was used whereby drawings are made onto stone and then printed on a direct press.

"Next semester," Garfin remarked, "we will have a new process called the UV Process in Screenprint and we will want to work with an invited artist using this new method."

Students are involved in the processing and printing of plates, in setting up paper, and in the curating of the editions, which, as Garfin explained, "means that they clean each print and prepare the prints for signature." Students are "often rewarded for their input by receiving signed artists' proofs of the pieces they've worked on."

For Robert Truszkowski, a MFA Print Media graduate, working with Christopher Armijo as collaborating printer was an enlightening experience.

"The opportunity to work at a professional level served to benefit my technical expertise as well as problem-solving abilities, all the while providing exposure to art and artists I might never have come in contact with," Truszkowski said.

Compelling art

Truszkowski, an accomplished visual artist with an extensive experience in teaching printmaking, said he finds print the most compelling of all studio arts. It "provides the opportunity to combine a highly technical, process-driven medium with the kind of time required to produce the work... and thereby reflect on the conceptual and theoretical notions inherent in producing art."

This semester the master printer is Matthew Letzelter, from Derrière les Étoiles studios in New York. "Concordia has been a wonderful experience so far," he acknowledged.

"I'm in the middle of two projects with David Elliott and Roland Poulin which will be multiple prints in limited editions."

Letzelter is based in New York, but keeps teaching full-time at Concordia in addition to the print projects he has underway.

"I'm also helping with the logistics and supervision of the upcoming move to our new building which will shut the studio down as soon as classes are over," he added.