Darren Waterston, The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense)

The Flowering The Fourfold Sense Darren Waterston Tyrus Miller

The Flowering The Fourfold Sense) Darren Waterston, in collaboration with Gallery 16 Editions, presents the The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense), a unique portfolio consisting of thirteen original prints by Waterston, with original texts by Tyrus Miller, exploring the senses and bodily experiences of Saint Francis of Assisi. The lush, colorful prints employ traditional and contemporary print-forms including relief printing and digital pigment printing; the accompanying texts are printed as letterpress broadsides.

Limited to an edition of forty, each suite of prints and broadsides are contained in an exquisite handmade cloth covered clamshell portfolio case made by John DeMerritt. Each print measures 18x13 inches.

The Flowering was produced in conjunction with Bay of the Weepers, a cycle of twentysix large-scale panel paintings examining the connections between Saint Francis of Assisi and the history of the city of San Francisco, from Spanish colonization to the present.

Work on the suite of thirteen prints and thirteen letterpress broadsides which make up The Flowering took place over the course of a fifteen month period between 2005 and 2007. While in residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbria, Waterston began to create what would be the foundation for the Flowering imagery. Darren immersed himself in the story of St. Francis of Assisi.

The artist created hundreds of sketches, watercolors, bits of ephemera. These were then sent to Griff Williams at Gallery 16 who digitized over 400 works on paper. The digital files were then compiled in a database to be used as elements in the composition of new original prints. Upon his return to San Francisco, the artist worked at Gallery 16 to develop two dozen new compositions by layering images and visual passages together, layer upon layer, much like the process of accumulation the artist employs as a painter. The inspiration for the project came from ancient artistic and literary traditions, but it was contemporary technology combined with traditional relief printing methods that manifest the images in print form.

The title of the portfolio, “The Flowering,” alludes to the Fioretti, “little flowers,” a medieval anthology of stories about Saint Francis of Assisi and his followers, which emphasizes the fantastic, the miraculous, and the sensational aspects of his popular legend. We have gathered in this portfolio a bouquet of new fictive blooms of Francis’s legend, transplanted in the soil of twenty-first century art and poetry. “The fourfold sense” refers both to the bodily senses of the saint and to the medieval practice of multilayered interpretation, which could elicit literal, historical, moral, and inner spiritual meanings from any passage of text, image, or event.

The text by Tyrus Miller was produced as letterpress broadsides that drew inspriation from the original manuscript of the Fioretti, a 14th Century account of the life of St. Francis. The Broadsides were printed with an original eidetic border that was generated using a series of Waterston’s handrawn marks digitally configured into a repeating pattern that contained the Tyrus Miller text. An extreme closeup of the detail within the border can be seen above.

In addition to the Flowering portfolio, Gallery 16 editions has published a series of larger original prints with the artist.

These works are limited to an edition of 20.

Each print measures 40.5 x 28.5.

Signed and numbered by the artist on the verso.

Fugue

Disembodiment Study

Mount Verna With Wound

Reverberations

St Clair

Darren Waterston has been exhibiting in the U.S. and abroad since the early 1990s. He received his BFA at the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles, CA and continued his training in Germany at the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin and the Fachhochschule für Kunst in Münster. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Recent exhibition highlights include: Forest Eater (2011), which Waterston conceived specifically for The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; Splendid Grief: The Afterlife of Leland Stanford Jr. (2009), an installation at The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, CA; and The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense) (2007), at the Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR. The monograph Darren Waterston: Representing the Invisible was published by CHARTA books in 2007.

Waterston’s paintings are included in numerous permanent collections including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Seattle Art Museum, WA; and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX. Tyrus Miller is an independent art critic and theorist, and a professor of modern European literature and visual culture at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He is the author of Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts (University of CA Press, 1999) as well as numerous articles on literature, film, electronic music, and the visual arts. Upcoming publications include Singular Examples: Aesthetic Politics of the Post-War Avant-Garde (Northwestern University Press) and an collection of essays entitled, Given World and Time: Temporalities in Context (Central European University Press, Budapest).

Gallery 16 and its imprint Gallery 16 Editions was founded by artist Griff Williams in San Francisco in 1993. We began inviting artists from around the world to exhibit their original work and produce limited edition prints, fine press books, and multiples using our range of traditional and cutting-edge digital print technology. The concept of bringing artists in to experiment with contemporary print technology follows a centuries old model of the technical workshop, in which artists and artisans come to produce works with master printers or craftsmen. This new version, however, blurs the lines between the gallery, the workshop, and the artist, creating a much more innovative and creative hybrid. The operation merges antiquarian technology such as letterpress, relief printing, and etching with new cutting edge digital print forms. Urban Digital Color was one of the first presses in the country to use contemporary digital printmaking methods to produce artist editions.

The Flowering (The Fourfold Sense) Suite of 13 original prints and 13 letterpress broadsides Contained in a cloth covered, debossed clamshell portfolio case.

Edition of 40; 18’’ x 13’’ paper size $13,000 Fugue Pigment print on Innova 310 gsm 40.5’’ x 28.5’’ Edition of 20 $3,000 Disembodiment Study Pigment print on Innova 310gsm 40.5’’ x 28.5’’ Edition of 20 $3,000 Mount Verna With Wound Pigment print on Innova 310gsm 40.5’’ x 28.5’’ Edition of 20 Reverberations Pigment print on Innova 310gsm 40.5’’ x 28.5’’ Edition of 20 St Clair Pigment print on Innova 310gsm 40.5’’ x 28.5’’ Edition of 20

Gallery 16 501 third st Sf CA 94107 gallery16.com 415 626 7495