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Para_digmPara_dox
Paradigm Paradox is the inaugural virtual exhibition of Printmakers Open Forum's Broadside Salon, curated by Asma Hashmi.
Curated by Asma Hashmi, exhibition statement by Quddus Mirza
Asma Hashmi works as an artist, art educator and curator. She was awarded the East West Centre Graduate Degree Fellowship, for Master of Fine Arts from University of Hawaii (USA) 1988- 1992 and received undergraduate degree from National College of Arts, Pakistan in 1986. Previously she held the post of Associate Professor at Indus Valley School of Art & Architecture, Karachi. Hashmi has exhibited her work in group and solo exhibitions internationally and has also Curated print portfolios and exhibitioQuddus Mirzans in UK, Pakistan and the United States. She currently lives and practices in Oxford, UK.
Asma Hashmi in the print studio
Exhibition artists:
1. Ryan Farley
Exhibition Statement by Quddus Mirza:
THE POWER OF A POSSIBLE PRINT
Anyone trained in the traditional methods of printmaking could recall earlier processes in which the final art piece is an impression, a residue, a detached image. Almost a memory of the visual initially created on a metal plate, a stone surface, a wooden block or linoleum sheet, the mesh screen. Primarily a done with a delayed time; because what exhibited in reality is a work made after, the first (or original) one drawing. Thus, it was logical that computer became another tool for making prints. You produce a complex visual on the luminous screen of your system, then print as many copies as you can manage.
The online exhibition ‘Paradigm/Paradox’, comprising of 24 artists is a reflection of all these sensibilities a printmaker picks, at a printmaking studio. Several of their works remind of other surfaces: rubbed, erased, wiped, destroyed, mutilated, merged, overlapped, hence communicating a message in time – or a message of time. These ‘remembrance of things past’, emerge in formal sense, as well as in their cultural context. Artists, such as Tony Joseph Carlone in Where it All Began, map the underlying level of a reality that has disappeared for common eye. That disappearance can be a dislocation as witnessed in the art of Lisa Wicka, Ani Volkan, and CAINGONG (Andrew Cain). This distance, translated in sensitive surfaces, is not a pictorial feature, but may interpreted in the light of present day scenario.
Times, now marked not by calendar, clock or commitments, but keeping safe social and physical distance seem to be an essential motif/concerns for the artists participating in this exhibition. Not much different from their viewers who had that bitter taste of remoteness, recently caused by pandemic. However, the experience can be shared and universal due to displacement, exile, war, death. Artists, like Minna Resnick, and Ryan Stander, suggest this human condition in/through their works.
During this period of self-isolation, it is observed that once removed from other bodies, your body becomes a burden. You live with yourself in the period of lockdown, and long for others. Once going through this phase, one could closely identify with the presence of body as occurs in the art of Tracy Templeton. Sensuous rendering of folds and limbs present a landscape that evokes memories, not peculiar to the maker, but for multiple viewers, since we all share bodies, even though in different packing, volume, finish, colour, and expiry date.
Since the possibilities of fabric was discovered, every human being has recorded the sensation of a sheet, either during sleep or inside a dream. Clothes, bedsheets, even tissue papers play a potent role in our personal, nocturnal, and carnal selves. For a visual artist, translating the memory of a sheet, also includes the exposure to a piece of paper, which bears the signs – and sighs of his/her exasperations. A number of artists have used paper as a veil, or an object, which can substitute reality with another option. Paper turned, twisted, moved, manipulated, in works by Ina Kaur, Amanda Thackeray, Rebekah Wilhelm, Kristian Sarette, appears to delineate private manoeuvres of this vulnerable substance.
However, paper could be a permanent presence, if not in physical format, then as an image, as represented in the works by Bill Brookover, and Jeffery R. Dell. Virtual substitute for the physicality of a tinted and transformed sheet of paper. This and other works from the exhibition – though diverse in approaches, imagery, techniques, dimensions – confirm a long forgotten fact. The incredible possibility of mankind to alter the material. God created human in clay, but we exist today in flesh. Perhaps we are the earliest prints in flesh, of a clay plate!
But today we also survive in paper. We are made of newspapers; we will be buried in printed paper. Our life is consumed on the information, knowledge, sentiments fed by daily papers; and on dyeing we do deserve a single column mention in a local newspaper.
Paper, either covered with text, or text as an independent substance paper (like in the prints of Dorothy Cochran) holds a prime importance for humans; it, in a way, is the coffin in which living dead are covered, whether working in a government office, writing a book, or making a drawing. The realization of paper as our passage to this – and other worlds, is fully recognized and realized in the exhibition, because here the difference between paper, paint, plate, computer, even among the maker and spectator diminishes. For good – in all sense of the word.
Quddus Mirza 2020
Quddus Mirza is an artist, art critic and independent curator. He is the Professor of Fine Art and the Head of Fine Arts Department at the National College of Arts Lahore. Mirza has shown extensively in numerous important group exhibitions, along with several one-person exhibitions, held in Pakistan and UK. He has also curated a number of exhibitions in Pakistan, UK and India. Mirza is an art critic with a regular weekly column appearing in Pakistan’s major newspaper, ‘The News’, and regular column on art Letter from Pakistan in ‘Art India’ and in ‘Depart’ (Bangladesh) as well as contributing to other publications like ‘Dawn’, ‘Herald’, ‘Himal’, ‘Libas’, ‘Contemporary’ and ‘Flash Art’. He is the co-author of book “50 Years of Visual Arts in Pakistan” and has extensively written essays on Pakistani art in different international catalogues and other publications. He is also the editor of online magazine ‘Art Now Pakistan’.
Exhibition artists (by appearance in video, websites included on each name):
Exhibition Essay by Quddus Mirza:
THE POWER OF A POSSIBLE PRINT
Anyone trained in the traditional methods of printmaking could recall earlier processes in which the final art piece is an impression, a residue, a detached image. Almost a memory of the visual initially created on a metal plate, a stone surface, a wooden block or linoleum sheet, the mesh screen. Primarily a done with a delayed time; because what exhibited in reality is a work made after, the first (or original) one drawing. Thus, it was logical that computer became another tool for making prints. You produce a complex visual on the luminous screen of your system, then print as many copies as you can manage.
The online exhibition ‘Paradigm/Paradox’, comprising of 24 artists is a reflection of all these sensibilities a printmaker picks, at a printmaking studio. Several of their works remind of other surfaces: rubbed, erased, wiped, destroyed, mutilated, merged, overlapped, hence communicating a message in time – or a message of time. These ‘remembrance of things past’, emerge in formal sense, as well as in their cultural context. Artists, such as Tony Joseph Carlone in Where it All Began, map the underlying level of a reality that has disappeared for common eye. That disappearance can be a dislocation as witnessed in the art of Lisa Wicka, Ani Volkan, and CAINGONG (Andrew Cain). This distance, translated in sensitive surfaces, is not a pictorial feature, but may interpreted in the light of present day scenario.
Times, now marked not by calendar, clock or commitments, but keeping safe social and physical distance seem to be an essential motif/concerns for the artists participating in this exhibition. Not much different from their viewers who had that bitter taste of remoteness, recently caused by pandemic. However, the experience can be shared and universal due to displacement, exile, war, death. Artists, like Minna Resnick, and Ryan Stander, suggest this human condition in/through their works.
During this period of self-isolation, it is observed that once removed from other bodies, your body becomes a burden. You live with yourself in the period of lockdown, and long for others. Once going through this phase, one could closely identify with the presence of body as occurs in the art of Tracy Templeton. Sensuous rendering of folds and limbs present a landscape that evokes memories, not peculiar to the maker, but for multiple viewers, since we all share bodies, even though in different packing, volume, finish, colour, and expiry date.
Since the possibilities of fabric was discovered, every human being has recorded the sensation of a sheet, either during sleep or inside a dream. Clothes, bedsheets, even tissue papers play a potent role in our personal, nocturnal, and carnal selves. For a visual artist, translating the memory of a sheet, also includes the exposure to a piece of paper, which bears the signs – and sighs of his/her exasperations. A number of artists have used paper as a veil, or an object, which can substitute reality with another option. Paper turned, twisted, moved, manipulated, in works by Ina Kaur, Amanda Thackeray, Rebekah Wilhelm, Kristian Sarette, appears to delineate private manoeuvres of this vulnerable substance.
However, paper could be a permanent presence, if not in physical format, then as an image, as represented in the works by Bill Brookover, and Jeffery R. Dell. Virtual substitute for the physicality of a tinted and transformed sheet of paper. This and other works from the exhibition – though diverse in approaches, imagery, techniques, dimensions – confirm a long forgotten fact. The incredible possibility of mankind to alter the material. God created human in clay, but we exist today in flesh. Perhaps we are the earliest prints in flesh, of a clay plate!
But today we also survive in paper. We are made of newspapers; we will be buried in printed paper. Our life is consumed on the information, knowledge, sentiments fed by daily papers; and on dyeing we do deserve a single column mention in a local newspaper.
Paper, either covered with text, or text as an independent substance paper (like in the prints of Dorothy Cochran) holds a prime importance for humans; it, in a way, is the coffin in which living dead are covered, whether working in a government office, writing a book, or making a drawing. The realization of paper as our passage to this – and other worlds, is fully recognized and realized in the exhibition, because here the difference between paper, paint, plate, computer, even among the maker and spectator diminishes. For good – in all sense of the word. Quddus Mirza 2020
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