SCHENECTADY - Printmakers push well beyond the page in “All that is Gathered,” the latest exhibit to open at Union College’s Crowell and West galleries.
Curated by Allison Conley, lecturer of visual arts in printmaking and drawing, the exhibit features installations and sculptures by printmakers Golnar Adili, Kristina Bivona and Karen Lederer.
It begins with poignant prints from Adili, who captures a series of arm gestures taken from photographs of her father. They function as studies, with Adili working through depicting movement, but they are also tender keepsakes, one print showing an embrace. Adili, a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist of Iranian descent, revisits the embraced pose in a nearby installation with prints of her father’s arms squeezing a white pillow, reflecting the comfort of the motion.
The daughter of political activists, Adili is often influenced by her adolescence in Tehran following the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Her work often features themes of displacement, longing, loss and a search for identity.
Printmaking is perhaps an ideal art form for that kind of exploration. As Conley notes, prints are the product of contact and separation, a process intrinsically linked to touch, departure and memory.
“These themes echo through the work as the artists reflect the intimate, complex and layered experiences they have gathered,” Conley said in a statement.
Elsewhere in the exhibit, pop-up books reflect on sex work and incarceration. Displayed on platforms hung from the ceiling, the multilayered books are a grungy marvel. In one, the first layer looks like a chain-link fence, obscuring a gritty landscape of limbs, fences and buildings. Another features a shopping cart and car, framed by looping pay phone cords.
The books were created by Bivona, a Brooklyn-based printmaker who co-established a printshop for prison diversion called Recess Art’s Assembly program, a nonprofit exhibition and studio space.
Directly across from Bivona’s books are the riotously colorful paintings and prints from Lederer. Her work mixes the graphic elements of monoprints with the movement of painting, bringing viewers inside with images of coffee mugs, fish bowls and an artist at work.
Everyday objects are blurred or obscured and in a sense made new again. She also gives New York City institutions a nod, referencing the Museum of Modern Art in a sizable work featuring an artist painting a mug with MoMA in a bold orange hue.
“All that is Gathered” opened Jan. 8 and will run through March 14 in the Crowell and West galleries in the Feigenbaum Center for Visual Arts. For information, visit union.edu.
