Event Title
O Death! Printing to the Great Unknown
Location
McGregor Room B
Start Date
25-9-2014 9:00 AM
End Date
25-9-2014 10:30 AM
Description
Panel Abstract:
The specter of death looms prominently in the historical and contemporary work of printmakers, from Andy Warhol’s electric chairs to Sue Coe’s slaughterhouses. Today’s printmakers face a myriad of questions concerning mortality, including medically enhanced longevity in wealthy nations, high infant mortality in economically disadvantaged populations, an earth slowly dying from overheating, and new technologies devised for mass murder. This panel will examine how artists explore the transition from life to afterlife, ranging from investigations into the connection between technology and genocide, human and urban decay, and the meaningful relationships we have with those who have passed before us. The panelists will describe how printmaking, with its inherent multiples and ability to create images on a diversity of substrates, gives them a unique advantage in reflecting the scale and scope of death. Additionally, panelists combine printmaking with elements of installation, video, and street art as they conduct an inquiry into the great unknown.
O Death! Printing to the Great Unknown
McGregor Room B
Panel Abstract:
The specter of death looms prominently in the historical and contemporary work of printmakers, from Andy Warhol’s electric chairs to Sue Coe’s slaughterhouses. Today’s printmakers face a myriad of questions concerning mortality, including medically enhanced longevity in wealthy nations, high infant mortality in economically disadvantaged populations, an earth slowly dying from overheating, and new technologies devised for mass murder. This panel will examine how artists explore the transition from life to afterlife, ranging from investigations into the connection between technology and genocide, human and urban decay, and the meaningful relationships we have with those who have passed before us. The panelists will describe how printmaking, with its inherent multiples and ability to create images on a diversity of substrates, gives them a unique advantage in reflecting the scale and scope of death. Additionally, panelists combine printmaking with elements of installation, video, and street art as they conduct an inquiry into the great unknown.
Comments
Panel Description:
The three panelists will present a diverse approach to the subject of death, exploring political, personal, and narrative approaches.
John Hitchcock examines death through a lens of personal and political history. An ancestor of indigenous peoples of Oklahoma, Hitchcock’s work documents the genocide of these same ancestors by European settlers. He will show how he uses the printed multiple to combine printed piles of slaughtered buffalos, symbolic flags, and ancestral animal images into an installation that attempts to come to terms with historical annihilation and personal remembrance.
Nathan Meltz will discuss the intersection of death with technology. He will discuss the narratives he creates combining printmaking with video and animation, in which robotic stand-ins for humans and animals face a variety of holocausts, from the factory farm to global atomic destruction. His work will show how printmaking, with its potential for both hard-edged graphic imagery, as well as painterly approaches, lends itself for stories that require both clear communication as well as potent emotional resonance.
Tonja Torgerson will discuss her practice that combines printmaking with street art that works to document both the decay of the human body and the death of the American city in post-industrial environments. Torgerson will show how printing figurative images on ephemeral substrates placed in decayed urban spaces calls a special attention to spaces formerly filed with life, but now condemned and crumbling. Her work also draws parallels between human biological decay and urban and architectural decay.
“O Death! Printing to the Great Unknown” relates to the conference theme by investigating the very meaning of the term “urban”. John Hitchcock will explore the creation of the modern American urban space through the destruction of an earlier, indigenous one. Tonja Torgerson will document the current state of urban places, from crumbling infrastructure and decay to reconstruction. Nathan Meltz will show the future of urban spaces, depicting life in futuristic utopian and dystopian urban spaces.