2023 5x5 catalog

PRINTAUSTIN

MYLES CALVERT JULIA CURRAN MEHDI DARVISHI ENRIQUE FIGUEREDO TIM PAUSZEK

PRINTAUSTIN

Presented in partnership with Link & Pin Gallery

Juried by Holly Borham

Thank you to our donors who generously covered prizes, creating the following awards:

The Nichols Award

The Admiral Hoy Foundation for the Arts Award

The Donnelly Award

The Union Design Company Award

The Penny and Bill Kobernusz Award

PRINTAUSTIN

PrintAustin is an artist-led nonprofit working with local venues and artists to showcase traditional and contemporary approaches in printmaking. Austin artists Cathy Savage and Elvia Perrin founded PrintAustin in 2013 and in 2014 produced their organization's first month-long festival, held from January 15 through February 15. PrintAustin has grown to include over sixty print-focused events serving thousands of audience members annually and attracting returning and new artists each year. Our mission is to share our enthusiasm for printmaking by helping galleries, universities, and artists curate, exhibit, and promote works on paper.

5X5

Produced in partnership with Link & Pin Gallery, The 5x5 is PrintAustin’s third annual online juried exhibition. The 5x5 is juried by Holly Borham, Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art at the Blanton Museum of Art. This virtual exhibition—with an in-person element at Link & Pin—showcases five works by five contemporary artists from the United States, giving us a broad survey of printmaking happening across the nation. In-depth artist features and online programming highlighting this year’s selected artists can be found on printaustin.org.

LINK & PIN GALLERY

The concept of Link & Pin is a progressive artist-influenced space offering artists not only a place to show their work but also a community they can be a part of and have an impact on. The ultimate plan is to have artists help select future artists.

The name, Link & Pin, is a term that describes the old-fashioned way of hitching rail cars together. It reflects both the space's proximity to a railroad track and describes the way the artists will be uniquely linked together.

Holly Borham

ABOUT THE JUROR

Holly Borham has been at the Blanton Museum of Art since 2017, where she is Associate Curator of Prints, Drawings, and European Art. Her exhibitions include Fantastically French! Design and Architecture in 16th to 18th-Century Prints (2022), After Michelangelo, Past Picasso: Leo Steinberg's Library of Prints (2021), and Copies, Fakes and Reproductions: Printmaking in the Renaissance (2019). Holly earned her PhD in Art and Archaeology from Princeton University and is a member of Print Council of America.

Myles Calvert, Subtle Was Rarely An Option , lithograph, 15" x 22", 2021

MYLES CALVERT

Rockhill, South Carolina / Ontario, Canada

Current work explores the conversations that develop between everyday objects of comfort and colour theory. Ideas navigate the spectrum from utilitarian forms through to the absurdly escalated and opulent. This notion of comfort often escalates to desire and an inherent, materialistic obsession to acquire and adorn. The chosen focal objects have been universal, recognizable and at times, mundane. I question why they must be objects at all, when the broad subject of landscape should also be challenged. My influences are drawn from printmakers such as Richard Hamilton, Patrick Caulfield, and Josef Albers, but also contemporary painters, designers, and digital artists who exceptionally manipulate colour (Flavia da Rin, Anish Kapoor, Mario Testino). Interests are rooted in the ideals of Romanticism - exploration of unique moments and personal emotion through the use of identifiable shape and colour variants. Unique surfaces are explored through print (screenprint, photopolymer etching, laser woodblock, lithography) - specifically, halftone structures and manipulations of those patterns/angles to achieve controllable photographic to distorted variants. The digital glitch present through Adobe software programs drives forward the question of technologies place and developing role in traditional processes. In particular, focus has been on melding traditional woodcut with laser woodcut variants, exploring MDF vs, plywood and plexiglass matrices.

squirrelpigeonfish.com

@squirrelpigeonfish

Myles Calvert, That Darn Healthy Glow, lithograph, 28" x 22", 2021

Myles Calvert, Vessel 3 (BMP), photopolymer etching on Arches Aquarelle, 22" x 15", 2022

Myles Calvert, Vessel 1 (Hairy Boy), copper plate etching and chine-collé, on Arches Aquarelle, 22" x 15", 2022

Myles Cavert, Vessel 2 (Webby Boy), copper plate etching,chine-collé, on Arches Aquarelle, 22" x 15", 2022

Julia Curran, Memento Mori for Evil Men (One Day You Too Will Die, She Will Eat You, Then Shit Out Your Bones), acrylic, serigraph, and collage on hinged wooden panels, 18" x 48" x 2", 2022

JULIA CURRAN

Los Angeles, California

I am a story-teller interested in what happens to connection in a society that separates the brain from the body, and sees itself as separate from nature. Recent work casts Mother Nature as mischievous, hungry, and not entirely benevolent monster-deities just below the surface lying in wait to devour, digest, decompose, and regenerate. Historically rooted in Hans Holbein’s Danse Macabre and Memento Mori paintings, these works remind us that one day, even those of us most inclined towards greed and cataclysm will die, and the earth will eat them and spring forth new life. If soil is a metaphor of transformation, what of ourselves can be reborn if we allow our most destructive parts to break down into fertile mulch? These works call for time to digest.

My background is in the socio-politically conscious tradition of printmaking, and I combine print techniques with painting and collage to make vibrant, multi-layered mixed media compositions. Stylistically, I embrace Hieronymus Bosch's elaborate mastery of the grotesque, and Frida Kahlo’s powerful and vulnerable self-portraits. Conceptually, I embrace Betye Saar’s commonly employed phrase “Extreme times call for extreme heroines,”and poet Alok Menon’s call for us to “find beauty in the parts of ourselves that we’ve marked for dead.” I seek to confront the challenges of our dangerously disembodied culture through highly-crafted prints and paintings meant to reconnect us with the substance of ourselves, our environment, and each other.

juliacurranprints.com @julia.s.curran

Julia Curran, What The Garden Gave Me, serigraph on paper, 24" x 18", 2022

Julia Curran, Spring Fingers, serigraph on paper, 18" x 24", 2022

Julia Curran , Mother Nature , woodblock print and oil on paper, 12" x 8" x 1", 2022

Julia Curran, Memento Mori for Evil Men (One Day You Too Will Die, She Will Eat You, Then Shit Out Your Bones), serigraph on paper, 18" x 24", 2022

Mehdi Darvishi, Evaporated, mezzotint and aquatint, 23.5” x 141.5”, 2020

MEHDI DARVISHI

Corpus Christi, Texas

“What you see is a vacant place left by a rider who has crossed the desert.” Bahman Mohasses Iranian contemporary artist

Reflecting on death as an inevitable end to life has long been the subject of inspiration for many artists' works of art. As Omar Khayyam, the Persian poet puts it: And we, that now make merry in the Room They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth Descend–ourselves to make a Couch–for whom?

As a professional artist, I too, have long been reflecting on this thought, carrying it with me as a reminder wherever I go. Knowing well that when death comes unannounced, I too, have to let it have its day.

The technique I have used for this series of work is mostly Mezzotint. Using the same plate, this technique allows for the reduction of tones to make new images and forms after making each series of editions. In this way, the plate is automatically destroyed by the creation process. As an artist who has left part of his existence into his works and when he dies, the only thing that remains is the artworks.

In the next phase, I have destroyed some of the real prints by scratching, burning, pouring some concealing materials, and using other impromptu ways to reconstruct all the occurrences that have occurred to my works over the last decade, and might possibly occur in at least a centenary; as I believe not every artist is lucky enough to have all his/her works preserved in museums and collections. As the main theme of this series of works is "life and its undeniable result: Death,” this reductive process is a good reflection of the way that I look at life and what is most essential.

mehdidarvishistudio.com

@mehdidarvishistudio

Mehdi Daravishi, Centenary/The Desert , reduction mezzotint, 39.4” x 30.7” , 2019

Mehdi Darvishi, The Extended Night, reduction mezzotint, 59” x 33.5”, 2017

Mehdi Darvishi, Outside of the Time, mezzotint and etching, 31.5” x 23.5”, 2015

Mehdi Darvishi, The Night, mezzotint, 23.5” x 31.5”, 2017

Enrique Figueredo, Plate 1 from Paso por aquí series, frottage and woodcut, 26" x 19" x .125", 2022

ENRIQUE FIGUEREDO

Austin, Texas

At the foundation of my work is a specific social message composed of elements based on memory, current events, and personal experience. The social message is rooted in folklore narratives, the economy of the Americas, and the crossing from illegal immigrant to naturalized citizen. My work thrives when I am researching historical and current facts and fiction that define the Americas. In creating revised accounts, I disrupt the viewer’s perception of authenticity in order to generate cultural critique. I utilize iconography to address identity, labor, politics, and migration. The mixed references do not lead toward a particular resolution, rather, they point toward a bold imagination. Inspired by Magical Realism, it is imperative that history is distorted, new characters are born, and that first-, second-, and third-hand records are amended. The evidence of the hand, chance, tool, and surface, and the alchemy of printmaking personalize the translation of content. It is through this practice that unpredictability may be achieved. I use line as a measure of time and human trajectory, as well as a mark-making utensil.

Enrique Figueredo, Plate 2 from Paso por aquí series, frottage and woodcut, 26" x 19" x .125", 2022

Enrique Figueredo, Plate 3 from Paso por aquí series, frottage and woodcut, 26" x 19" x .125", 2022

Enrique Figueredo, Plate 5 from Paso por aquí series, frottage and woodcut, 26" x 19" x .125", 2022

Enrique Figueredo, Plate 6 from Paso por aquí series, frottage and woodcut, 26" x 19" x .125", 2022

Timothy Pauszek, Mom's Spoons: 1960-2005 and Every Year After That, Lithograph, 24" x 18", 2019

TIMOTHY PAUSZEK

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Mom’s Spoons is a series of stone lithographs of my late mother’s travel spoons. The work explores working-class relationships to trinkets as life markers and memories of loved ones.

timpauszek.com @timpauszek_studio

Timothy Pauszek, Thanks for the Wedding Rings (Miranda Loves Them), Lithograph, 12" x 16" x 0", 2019

Timothy Pauszek, Family Vacation, Lithograph, 12" x 16", 2019

Timothy Pauszek, My Collection, After Mom's, Lithograph, 12" x 16", 2019

Timothy Pauszek, Dad's Collection, After Mom's, Lithograph, 12" x 16", 2019

info@printaustin.org printaustin.org

A special thanks to our sponsors for helping to make 5x5 possible:

This project is supported in part by the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin Economic Development Department, The Still Water Foundation, and private individuals.