panel session A2
PRINTS AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
THURSDAY MARCH 19, 10:00-11:30AM
KNOXVILLE CONVENTION CENTER LECTURE HALL
Session Chair: Kevin Haas, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington, USA
Email: khaas@wsu.edu
Prints surround us with words and images in the built environment from monumental billboards to small stickers directing us to our destination. The printed matrix is also evident in the materials and processes of residential and commercial architecture. As artists working with prints, how do we address and intersect with our built environments? Do we use the printed image to infiltrate the built environment, or to envision new utopian or dystopian ones? This session invites artists with an interest in the built environment, or who already address the built environment in their work, to exchange ideas, questions, and projects.
Presenter 1: Sang-Mi Yoo, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA
Paper Title: Repetition and Difference
Using seriality similar to Minimalists’ works, Sang-Mi Yoo’s print works focus on the ideal home through prints, lasercut wool felt and their three-dimensional conversions. The reality of finding an ideal home and an ideal body residing within such environments is explored through American norms. Her work is based on her childhood memories from Korea and everyday encounters of standardized residential buildings, including her West Texas living experience. Like an animal’s camouflage, this homogeneity provides her with a means to blend into her neighborhood. Her installations of large-format prints and lasercuts are based upon patterns created from cookie-cutter homes found in Lubbock, Houston, and other global locations. The rows of houses and floorplans become abstract constructs that are subject to gravity and shadow play surrounding the materials, questioning whether the ideal home is a tangible subject or an illusion.
Presenter 2: Nick Satinover, Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, USA
Paper Title: Preserves: Poetics and Didactics in the Landscape
A discussion of the work of Nick Satinover and several other print media artists whose work examines the past and present of landscape using didactic and poetic strategies. The writing of David Lowenthal will guide this discussion, providing examples, criticism and conceptual background for how didactics change the experience of landscape.
Presenter 3: Amze Emmons, Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
Paper Title: Prints in the Built Environment
Cheaply produced large-scale digital printing has changed our visual landscape for the stranger. Specifically, large-scale photographic prints have infiltrated the urban and industrial landscape in many unprecedented ways. For example, in many of the rapidly changing mega-cities in China, photographic billboards are used to cover-up sites of gentrification fueled demolition, often with depictions of European mountains and fields, while in the US, that same new construction gambit will often depict architectural renderings of how the new building will appear, and in historic European cities, this print technology can often be seen depicting the building being restored underneath in a one-to-one scale. This technology has also radically changed the look of low-end commercial enterprises displacing hand-painted signs with digitally scaled vernacular design. I propose to provide a critical frame for understanding how this sea change in printing technology has lead to a deeply changed built environment.
Presentation 4: Nick Conbere, Emily Carr University in Vancouver, Canada
and John Holmgren, Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, USA
Paper Title: A Pause in the Flow: Dams on the Columbia River
Artists John Holmgren and Nick Conbere collaborative series of mixed-media prints layer together drawing and photography to engage audiences in considering relationships between hydro-electric dams, their surrounding environments, and urban centres. Focusing on how the Columbia River dams in Washington and British Columbia have affected the character and ecology of river basin, a central theme is the struggle to comprehend the implications of human constructions that drastically alter the character of a place. Processes including intaglio, screen printing, digital printing, and drawing are combined to find visually inventive ways to interpret the imagery. The final body of artwork will have a sense of the lyrical, and real-world imagery and information will resonate metaphorically and allegorically, creating a space for the imagination.
