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VIRTUAL GALLERY

Spring 2020

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the IU Southeast printmaking community took on remote learning and making. We're excited to share all the products of hard work, effort, and creative problem solving.

Intermediate and Advanced

Intermediate and Advanced Printmaking

Students took home the knowledge they'd built in the first half of the semester's Silkscreen and Lithography focus areas. Though they didn't work with these particular media at home, you'll see them setting up studio work environments, using complex color and layer planning strategies, and merging digital and analog techniques - just as they had done together in the studio. 

AMBERLY BURNS

Printmaking II Silkscreen

Amberly Burns creates art based on past, present and not-yet-discovered, intimate connections she has among individuals within the sphere of her own existence. Using monotype, intaglio, screenprint and painting, Amberly depicts emotional experiences in the form of vibrant colors, tones and environmental inspiration to develop an imaginative relationship with the images she produces. Combining print techniques and digital technology, the artist is able to provide a wide range of unique, layered, imagery that invokes nostalgia, perspective and insight. By producing artworks depicting various human emotions, as well as lived experiences, Amberly reminds the viewer of the significant impact other human beings can have on a single life.

EMILY BEALER

Printmaking II Silkscreen

Emily Bealer explores identity and distortion as a commentary on the shared human experience.  With drawing and painting, the combination of analog and digital media highlights the human condition. The imagery of distorted figures and dark environments seeks to create a relationship between one’s own identity and the identity of another. The questions we all ask ourselves of who we are and what we want in life are a lasting query. Identity changes with time, with past ones becoming distorted and forgotten. The reconnection with her past has led Bealer to question her own choices about identity.

 

The concepts of distorted identity in figures arose from the need of an outlet and stability in her life. This was a way to channel all the confusion, anxiety, and fear that came with figuring out who she was and who she was becoming. The personal expression helped to better connect those feelings with others in a relatable way. Hearing of other’s stories of self-expression has led to a deeper comprehension of her own. Bealer hopes the viewer can form a connection to these works to better understand themselves and their place in the world.

EMMA SCHAD

Printmaking II Lithography

As blood rushes through my body, I wonder if fruit feels the same way while it grows upon a mother tree. I wonder if this fruit is aware of its impending doom, of the consequences of gravity; the gravity/trauma I have experienced tells me that the answer is no. I face the abuse and alienation that has come out of being a woman, and experiences I never would imagine happening to me as I grew. In my body of work, I use fruit to represent the bodies of women and the hardships that they face.

 

Using bright colors and bold outlines, I manifest fruit that does not exist in this world, that exists on a different plane of reality. This cosmic plane produces fruits that are fuzzy, starry, scratchy, bumpy, and packed with geometric pattern. The juxtaposition of organic form and geometric pattern represents the real women beneath all of the expectations that they feel pressured to fit into. Bruises are depicted on some of the fruits in order to honor the victims that women often become when unrealistic expectations are placed upon their shoulders- expectations to be silent about their abuse, expectations to dress a certain way, expectations to fit a certain mold in their career paths or family lives. This body of work meditates on my ability to grow and the ability to share my heart despite the trauma I have experienced. With this work, I aim to create a sense of togetherness among women and empower those who have lived through what they thought they wouldn’t.

ERIN KORB

Printmaking II: Silkscreen

Erin Korb creates work that reflects on the environment and nature, as well the interconnections human beings have with the natural world. Her intentions are to show people how their actions affect not only humans but the earth as a whole. Through the use of photography, ceramics, printmaking and digital platforms, she is able to point out the importance of environmental balance. Erin’s process starts in and around nature, whether it’s traveling, hiking or just sitting in her backyard. She finds ways to accentuate even the smallest beauty that nature has to offer and finds ways to highlight this within her work. Her intentions are to display how she perceives the world and create impact on others

MERLIN T. LEE

Printmaking II: Lithography

Merlin T. Lee is interested in uncertainty, liminality, and existence. These concepts are explored through the use of both image-based media and by creating experiences in the third and fourth dimensions (with both installations and multimedia sculpture). A variety of materials from wood and plaster to inks and solvent transfers along with digital audio and video works are used to create these pieces. These concepts and explorations come together to express the feelings of angst and despair in periods of limbo. During these periods, one is no longer able to return to their old way of life, even if they wanted, while their new position and direction is still unclear. Even through this daze, time is still marching on, whether desired or not. The dissonant combination of these two states only serves to further heighten the feelings of angst and despair from the state of limbo. Overall, the aim of this work is to create a sense of solidarity with others in a place of limbo.

MACY REYNOLDS

Printmaking II Silkscreen

Macy Reynolds is a Louisville based graphic designer, illustrator and printmaker.


Her work communicates ideas surrounding individualism, power, and femininity. Typically, her works displays a graphic style meaning she implements a strong use of line, a bold color palette, and her artwork is primarily two-dimensional. Inspired by the mid 1900’s American Traditional style of tattooing, her work typically exhibits imagery associated with this style. Many of these motifs include symbols such as roses, swallows, ships, skulls, anchors, sharks, and more. In the early 20th century, each of these symbols held a variety of meaning to the sailors that wore them. As a symbol of power, strength, and femininity, a common theme seen throughout her work, specifically her printmaking work, is the panther. Seen in her screen print titled “Panther Head and Roses” is a large panther head with two roses curved towards the bottom of the panther. This work presents a solid, consistent line weight, with a heavy use of black and red, two colors consistently used in American traditional tattooing.      


Her work spans many different medias and techniques such as screen printing, linoleum printing, and digital drawing using applications such as procreate on her iPad Pro.

MANUEL HERNANDEZ

Printmaking II Silkscreen

Manuel Hernandez Sanchez is an American artist born in the city of Tenochtitlan. At a young age Hernandez, was brought to the United states in hopes of having a better life. Growing up he felt out of place since he was brought to this strange new environment. Hernandez realized not everyone accepted him no matter how hard he tried to fit in. He decided that his unique identity family heritage should be celebrated and, in the process, point out the struggles that come with it. struggles of being oppressed and not having the same opportunity. with his work he hopes to inspire all those who feel like they do not belong for whatever reason to not fear who they are. Reading about how terribly in the past the native groups in America were treated affected him. Filled with so much anger and knowing he cannot change the past, Hernandez in an effort to change the future treatment of marginalized groups now celebrates his heritage without shame. Hernandez includes elements of his Mesoamerican and indigenous ancestors in his works.


Figures from myths and real-life events populate a good portion of his work.  He combines these with elements of current day events religion, and governments. With all these elements he makes mural like paintings inspired by the Mexican muralist movement showing events such as the discovery of America through his perspective. He makes portraits of people and animals showing magical elements tying into the Mexica mythology and modern-day indigenous symbolism. Hernandez hopes that through his depictions of his identity and heritage others will be inspired to show off their own unique traits and learn to accept each other’s unique elements as well.

REBECCA WEST

BFA Printmaking

I am creating work to explore inherent contradictions between the fleeting and ephemeral nature of life, and human desires for meaning and permanence. Through etchings, lithographs, and interactive mixed media artworks, I investigate what elements create a haunted experience, in which the material world becomes supernatural. I embrace this contradiction by revealing ghosts: not traditional human spirits, but rather animals, architecture, letters, and other elements of the material world that are imbued with eeriness and imply what was. The supernatural for me is not about another world, but about elements of this world that transcend the material to become more than what we perceive.

Printmaking allows me to explore hauntedness in a variety of ways. The intangible can be depicted with layering, invisible ink, and other unique ways of viewing that are made possible through print, such as stereoscopic viewing cards. By working in layers, I create prints that depict what is hidden from the material world but nevertheless exists in and alongside it. With intaglio and lithography, I create scenes so overwhelmingly detailed that they transform the everyday into the strange. The passage of time is a crucial element of ghostliness, and monoprint approaches allow me to alter a scene to explore changes over time, with variations in color overlays, backgrounds, and foregrounds.

While the products of these worldbuilding exercises feels deeply personal, as they rely on a specific lexicon of symbols and visual cues, I invite viewers to interact and explore these worlds, whose spaces are often occupied by simultaneous happenings and surprises. Minute details, barely visible or invisible layers, or written components invite the viewer to spend time reading or searching the work for added details and narrative. Interactive elements such as the stereoscope or the UV penlight mediate the viewer’s relationship to the artwork, transforming the ordinary viewing of artwork into a physical experience. I am trying to create a space for myself to experience that intersection of material, spiritual, emotional, historical, real, and unreal that exists only in the human mind.

SAMANTHA EARLEY

BFA Printmaking 

Since August 2018, poet Nancy DeJoy and printmaker Samantha Earley have developed and evolved a collaborative project in which we explore ways to understand the singular and collective meaning of our lives through the integration of poetry and printmaking. In our endeavor, we concretize the emotive power of the poetic by connecting sensory words with images that are illustrative or abstract. We have a particular disinterest in continuing the traditional type of artist-viewer or teacher-student dialectic, where the artist/teacher is the depositor of knowledge and the audience/student is the recipient of the deposit. This means part of our process is to create ways for viewers who see our work to interact with one another and to respond to unfinished pieces to help us and them expand understanding of the work. Viewer responses allow people to bring the diverse experiences, knowledge bases, and value systems to our work; they do so in ways that position viewers as something other than consumers and, in doing so, they expand how we think about the language/visual art relationship and the audience/artifact relationship. In this sense, one of our basic aims is to include poetry both as an artifact and as a social object in order to enhance the possibilities for creating more inclusive public art events, especially in museums and galleries. Merging poetry and printmaking opens a space for the poetic in the visual arts, and more generally in museums and galleries. Within the interactions people have over our work, we foster community, even if the community is built only for the time the individuals spend in the gallery. Combining our work as printmaker and poet has given us the opportunity to invite others to experience art as something that inspires connection and prompts people to add their own stories to those artifacts/stories/glimpses of life that we hang in public art spaces.

SAVANNAH FERRELL

Printmaking II Lithography

I am interested in exploring and memorializing the relationship between women, girls, time, and trauma. What happens to girls as we age into women that makes us so vulnerable to being taken advantage of? From puberty to adulthood, where is the transition, what does it look like? I’m tracing the line of my own trauma to my childhood self—how did I get from there to here? What parts of the world outside me influenced me to get here? What do I associate with this transition, with girlhood, and womanhood? To answer these questions, I consider the aspects of the socialization and conditioning of women under patriarchy which forces us into this vulnerability. My work portrays what women’s specific relationship with trauma looks and feels like through the combination of my own experiences with feminine subjects and symbols.

Whether in drawing, print, sculpture, or large-scale installation, I utilize vivid colors and negative space to form dream-like spaces filled with symbols of femininity. These symbols dually represent seemingly positive patriarchal ideals of femininity and how these ideals are actually detrimental for women. The lexicon includes the Victorian language of flowers, nostalgic childhood objects, things associated with feminine care/lifestyle, allusions to the excessive, grotesque feminine body, and the classical female nude. I reference pre-twentieth century representations of women in the Western canon, often appropriating exact poses from classical—always men—masters. Deliberately posed figures narratively interact with these spaces, creating feelings of insecurity, confusion, and anxiety as they move through a projection of my own trauma. I mesh worlds and characters with literature appropriated from similar eras in history, further subverting and obscuring the illusive and traumatic world of femininity.

Ceramic vessels have long been thought to reflect femininity or the feminine form. Clay has been sexualized and fetishized for its allusion to the female body. I use this to my advantage, as ceramic sculpture encapsulates the feminine form even when it doesn’t look like a woman. Appropriated floral patterns, subdued images of violence against women, as well as hand-drawn and gold luster accents decorate my forms. My aim is to communicate the multi-faceted experiences and memories of women through this complex layering of imagery. History and society create a pretty and perfumed mold for us, it hides the ugliness and violence of patriarchy, but still our time deserves to be memorialized and acknowledged.

 

Using print media, bookbinding, male-created nudes, and male-dictated traditional Western beauty ideals, I critique historical representations of women. Print has a strong connection to publishing, distributing information, and determining standards and ideals for society. I utilize this connection to highlight the disparities in these traditional representations, to show the distribution of feminine ideals actually hurts women and contributes to our collective trauma.

Women are associated with closed-off, domestic spaces; with nature and the low material world. Privacy is bound to femininity; femininity is excessive and grotesque and must be contained, must be kept quiet, erased. The spaces I create mimic this privacy; they are hidden, mystical, embedded in nature, and fictional.

An overflowing vessel connects to feminine excess. Flowering foliage disguises violence and restriction, creating a nauseating illusion of saccharine sweetness. This world I depict, a world women are forced into by patriarchy, is detached, suffocated, painful, private, and filled with empty air. ­­­­

SAVANNAH BOWLING

Printmaking II: Lithography

Savannah works with colors, clay, printmaking, painting, and drawing. She can do a little bit of everything. She is not currently working in a certain area of art but, she loves doing all art. She feels that is the only thing that she can do right. She feels that her disabilities make it hard for her to do good in math, English, history, and more. All she needs is her hands and she is really good with her hands.

 

Savannah’s work is Disney themed but with her own twist of what she sees in the Disney movie. She uses her drawings and her color skills to play on the different scenes. Even though it’s a print she does this by sketching it out and going over it with different materials. She uses texture in all her words to make unique patterns in her background or her pottery work. She also uses texture to make her scenes for the Disney character or whatever Disney object is in her work it all plays together and how she makes all of her art pieces.

STASHIA SMYRICHINSKY

Printmaking II Lithography

When I am asked what kind of art I make, I usually say anything I can get my hands on. When I say this, I mean it quite literally, anything tactile or any materials I can get ahold of. This can include, but is not limited to drawing, painting, printmaking, bookbinding, collage, ceramics, sculpture, video art, floral design, poetry, and music. I want my art to be a platform for viewers to confront their own emotions, memories, dreams, and the spaces where they overlap. My work in a variety of media evokes personal emotions and refers to my own unconscious processes and dreams, and asks viewers to access thoughts and visions they otherwise wouldn’t. I am interested in the energy that connects all of us, and the ways art can expose the mind to a new stimulus and remove of barriers put up by the conscious and subconscious.


I am inspired by nature, the universe, surrealism, the metaphysical, and the synchronicities that link us all. I hope to intertwine the magick of life that I have experienced for myself with that of my viewers. When connecting with these vast realms I chose to express myself with a cool toned color palette, black and gold, via high contrast imagery and playing with organic flowing shapes. Layering shapes in a composition is a strong reflection of how beings interact with each other. Positioning flowing bodies in a dreamscape, both on this physical plane and in the astral plane, is how I relate my life with others. I am inspired by nature, the universe, surrealism, the metaphysical, and the synchronicities that link us all. I hope to intertwine the magick of life that I have experienced for myself with that of my viewers.


In the studio, I work between a mediated, experimental approach and a more spiritual, intuitive one. I work in a variety of media to allow each of my senses to react to new modes and possibilities. This allows me to transfer information learned from past experiments and apply them to new scenarios when working in a flow state. I wish to intertwine abstractionism with esotericism as I channel divine energy during my flowing creative state. Generating work through the great mediator between the head and the hands- the heart. This allows me to access the deepest layers of my subconscious and the full spectrum of my emotions while connecting with multiple versions of my higher selves. The messages, experiences, and reactions I have in the meditative flow state is the generator of my work. I am the vessel into which the vibrational energy may resonate through. I wish to share this with others by exposing my vulnerability, power, and honesty with an intent that the viewer will dive deeper within themselves and reflect, using my work as a mirror.

SYDNEY NALLEY

Printmaking II Silkscreen

"Yet You, Lord, are our Father. We are the clay, You are the potter; we are all the work of Your hand." - Isaiah 64:8

As a child, my favorite toy was always my crayon box. Creativity has been a huge part of who I am for the entirety of my life. It is because of this that my work is largely based in storytelling and scripture. An important part of communicating my story begins with the process. Getting my hands messy with paint or squishing clay between my fingers is often more enjoyable for me than finishing a piece of artwork. It is in these moments that I feel connected to my faith the most; just as my God created the world around me, I am able to create my own small world through creative expression.

 During my artistic process, I combine realism with pattern and texture to create interesting pieces that are often interpreted as craft. I strongly believe that everything and anything can be art, which is why I choose to not limit myself by picking one artistic medium. Instead, I use a combination of drawing, ceramics, papermaking, printmaking, and more. By expanding my concept of what can be considered art, I am able to dive deeper into the narrative behind my work. 

BASIC PRINTMAKING MEDIA

Relief: Linocuts Printed by Hand

Before we left campus, students made up printing kits to use away from the studio. They responded to the theme "Spring" for a portfolio exchange.

Intaglio: Line Etching with Copper Plates

This project was underway when it was determined we wouldn't return to school for the rest of the semester. So stay tuned for a later date, when we can meet again to etch and print these plates!

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