EXCHANGE PORTFOLIOS
In additon to being displayed in the Art and Architecture Building, and the Knoxville Convention Center, portfolios organized for the conference will be allotted a time in which participants can collect their edition and meet their fellow participants. Participants who cannot pick up their portfolios at the conference will be responsible for the cost of return shipping. All viewings and distribution will take place on Thursday, March 19th in 200DE.
A Session Viewing and Pick-Up: 10:00am-11:30am
AGRITOPIA: ADVENTURES IN THE GLOBAL FOOD CHAIN
Organized by Emmy Lingscheit, Michael Barnes and Sarah Smelser
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 443
This portfolio invites participants to engage visually and conceptually with agricultural practices across the globe, and also to imagine how food production might look in the future as new technologies emerge to meet the demands of 8 billion people. Modern large-scale agricultural practices make possible the societies we now live in, but have serious ramifications in many spheres. Ethical concerns, food safety issues, and a growing awareness of the negative ecological impact of industrial agriculture have led many individuals, communities, and even corporations to strive for more sustainable approaches to food cultivation. These adaptations range from organic vegetable plots on the low-tech end of the spectrum, to lab-grown meat on the high end. The first hamburger made from meat artificially grown in a lab was eaten in August, 2013. Worldwide, demand for meat is higher than ever as economic growth in developing nations allows more people to eat higher up the food chain. In what ways might we further manipulate the food chain in order to continue to survive and thrive as a species? Printmakers who hail from the great corn, soybean, and print-producing state of Illinois are especially encouraged to apply.
DOG HEAD STEW: THE SECOND COURSE
Organized by Elizabeth Klimek and Melanie Yazzie
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 329
The first “Dog Head Stew” portfolio created in 2003 and exhibited at the SGC conference in Boston is still being exhibited nationally and internationally. This unique portfolio celebrates Native American traditions and cultural persistence, which over time and situation has been redefined, honored, manipulated, categorized and stereotyped, but not vanquished. This portfolio invites personal and political expression honoring or criticizing past and present representations of Native American culture. This new portfolio, “Dog Head Stew: The Second Course,” will it pick up where the last portfolio left off. The title comes from the story/recipe “Dog Head Stew (for Fifty People)” by Dorothy Pennington, which can be found in the book, The Way: An Anthology of American Indian Literature by respected Mohawk anthropologist and educator Shirley Hill Will. It is the depiction of an imaginary feast in which the Native Americans throwing the feast pretend to live up to the stereotype of being savages to get rid of their unwanted, non-native dinner guests. What has changed in the past ten years for the indigenous community of North America? Where do Native Americans fit into the sphere of the United States, and subsequently, to the world? Graphic icons such as the Cleveland Indian are still used in today’s culture, how much power do those images still possess? This portfolio is open to printmakers working with traditional and non-traditional archival print media, regardless of cultural background.
MAPPING THE MISSISSIPPI
Organized by Kristin Powers Nowlin
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: ART MARKET GALLERY
This portfolio brings together the work of printmaking artists living and/or working along the Mississippi River. The mighty river serves as a literal connection between these artists, traveling over 2,300 miles between northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. While the river is a commonality, the differences that can occur along its banks can be tremendous. Simultaneously, raging floodwaters might harass those living along the banks in Missouri, while calm waters might be found in Minnesota. Similarly, though connected by this geographic landmark, the diverse artists along the river span the possibilities of print ranging from traditional prints, to mixed media, and digital hybrid printmaking. Print artists living and/or working within one-hundred miles of the banks of the Mississippi River are encourage to submit proposals to participate.
SPHERE OF EXISTENCE
Organized by James Boyd Brent and Josh Bindewald
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 443
The prints in this portfolio address our relationship with the world(s) using the dimensions that Martin Waldseemüller used in his “gore map” of 1507. Waldseemüller’s print is a two-dimensional map that could be stuck to a three-dimensional globe in order to create a globe map that was a spherical representation of the geographical knowledge of his day. Each artist will map his or her own sphere, using this original gore prototype for spherical mapping.
B Session Viewing and Pick-Up 12:00pm-1:30pm
ALL'S FAIR AT THE FAIR
Organized by Guen Montgomery
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: KCC PARK CONCOURSE
All’s Fair at the Fair, a 1938 cartoon by Max Fleischer, opens with a futuristic skyline and a happy country couple approaching the glittering World’s Fair in their horse-drawn cart. They are shortly whisked away into this spectacular world, where everything is better, faster, more convenient, and from a 21st century perspective, infinitely more bizarre. In 2015 the great printmaking exposition SGC International will take place in Knoxville, TN, site of the 1982 World’s Fair. This portfolio celebrates this confluence, and invites printmakers to explore a wide variety of subjects related to the phenomena of World’s Fairs. A print created for this folio could take on the illustrative nature of World’s Fair publicity posters, visually investigate the World’s Fair format in terms of its questionable continued relevance, invent a possible/impossible blueprint for a future fair, or create, appropriate or alter existing photography of landscapes changed by an exposition. One could reference industrial innovation, unrelenting progress, futuristic or bygone technologies, fantastical architecture, “cultural exchange,” fairground animals, robots, fashion or any other subject generally pertaining to the theme. Participants are encouraged to respond to Max Fleischer’s cartoon (viewable on You-Tube, with a still image shown below) and look to Knoxville’s 1982 World’s Fair for further inspiration.
DISTORTION
Organized by Wuon-Gean Ho
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA HALLWAY CASE 443
The theme “Distortion” celebrates our subjective view of the world and calls for prints which require a unique vantage point, both physically as well as conceptually, in order to be read. This topic draws upon the tricks of perspective in Italian Renaissance ceilings and Dutch interiors, to the anamorphic work of Holbein and Escher, and 19C optical toys such as the magic mirror and praxinoscope. The act of human perception filters and alters vision though processes of synesthesia, color blindness, and hallucination. Technology both extends and distorts what we can see, through the use of infrared film and heat sensitive recording devices, X-Rays and other medical instrumentation, holograms, wide-angle lenses and prisms. Note: as the portfolio organizer lives in the United Kingdom, participants selected for the project may send completed editions to the conference host in Tennessee.
IT NEVER ENDS!: QUEERS IN THE HISTORICAL PRESENT
Organized by Paper Buck
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA SCULPTURE TRAY
This portfolio will bea collaborative, multimedia print portfolio and project that explores the complex life of history in everyday queer experience today. The project builds upon the 2015 SGCI conferences’ metaphorical articulations of the sphere to draw a connection between queers, spheres and social history as infinitely dimensional, potentiate, and relational in form. Selected artists will enter a low-intensity guided creative production process, working remotely and in collaborative connection over the course of 2014. Artists will be generating interdisciplinary new works that explore narratives of familial history, racial formations, nation, migration, identity and socio-political transformation. Communications will occur in digital form, but artists will have opportunities to utilize technical print support from the curator, Paper Buck, artist/organizer and Print Studio Manager at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. “It Never Ends!” will attempt to queer artist-curator relationships while reimagining the editioning and portfolio production processes. Participant leadership during the guided process will be encouraged and creative assignments from guest artist facilitators will support abundant feedback and connection. The project will culminate with an approach to bound portfolio exhibition that allows for the expansion of print-based works into web-based, sculptural, public, installation, or moving image formats. Following the debut at the conference, participants will have the opportunity to show selected works in the exhibition The Everyday Life of History, to open June 2015 at the Historisches Rathaus in Dringenberg, Germany.
SPHERE OF INFLUENCE
Organized by Sophie Knee
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 441
This portfolio brings together the former students of Charles Massey, Jr., who has taught printmaking at The Ohio State University since 1974. In those 39 years, he has had a profound influence on generations of students, many of whom are still printmakers today. The portfolio is intended to commemorate his many years of tireless dedication to his students. The theme of the portfolio, “Secrets”, is inspired by Charles's own body of work in printmaking. One of Charles's many strengths as a teacher is that he always emphasized that each student must explore their own vision, make their own work, and find their own voice. Please interpret the theme to create a print characteristic of your own personal style.
C Session Viewing and Pick-Up 1:45pm-3:15pm
BETTER LIVING
Organized by Ashton Ludden
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA SCULPTURE TRAY
This print portfolio focuses on our perpetual drive to live better than ever before. Humans continue to advance our way of living beyond the needs of survival with an everlasting strive for MORE and BETTER: more comfort, better efficiency, more convenience, better quality, and simply more pleasure in our products and our lives. Participants may consider significant advancements such as medicine, transportation, communication, agriculture, and robotics, or may look to more ridiculous and unnecessary products such as Keurigs, slippers with headlights, automatic cereal dispensers, heated toilet seats, and Segways. As the ultimate creators of the multiple, how do contemporary printmakers relate our artistic practice, which holds a unique history to mass production, to these consumer products? How do our products indirectly connect us with other people and untold stories around the world? Prints should express this perpetual drive for better living standards, including the benefits and consequences of our desired comforts.
MONDO TONDO
Organized by John Driesbach
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 443
The 1962 film “Mondo Cane” had a form that was intended to shock viewers in the placid early sixties. Its slapdash construction of nominally documentary footage placed Western mourners weeping over lost pets adjacent to footage of similar animals butchered for dinner elsewhere. Later “Mondo” exploitation films turned toward mud wrestling, nude skiing, circumcision rituals, slave trade, and strange obsessions and rituals from throughout the world. “Mondo Cane,” is an Italian idiom roughly equivalent to “dog gone it.” But, in the aftermath of the movie, the term “mondo”has become synonymous with bizarre. Participants are to explore themes of their choosing in a tondo---circular, 15-inch format.
VINYL
Organized by Anita Jung
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 329
This portfolio project celebrates vinyl records. Knoxville is a great music city inside of a great music state, they even put musical instruments on their commemorative quarter. Participants can pull from some of the music history of Knoxville or their personal relationship with vinyl. Records are flat spheres, sort of, that is at least how I arrived at this idea. This project leaves a lot to artistic interpretation regarding materials used as well as if the print is just a record or a record within an album; a round or square print, vinyl records also have two sides, each comprising one half of an album, etc Please note that editions will be due early – November 15, 2014.
WILL THE CIRCLE BE UNBROKEN
Organized by Rich Gere
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 329
A 1972 album titled after a song by Ada R. Habershon and reflects how the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band was trying to tie together two generations of musicians. Within their own influential circle artists are invited to pull from generations past and printmaking’s rich history to inspire works for this portfolio. This topic is designed to explore the influences that may be a mentor or artist who has had a major impact and make that historical connection. This portfolio is the opportunity to create a new “Die Brücke” to that influence.
D Session Viewing and Pick-Up 3:30pm-5:00pm
BUBBLE UP
Organized by Karla Hackenmiller
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: KCC PARK CONCOURSE
Historically World’s Fairs have brought together a variety of inventive and creative ideas from many, distant geographical locations for display in a single event. Through this practice, great minds were able to learn from each other and use that inspiration to move forward with new and better ideas of their own. As artists we often parallel this process by working in our isolated studio bubbles and then sharing the results in group exhibitions. When bubbles come together the result is sharing and an expanded understanding of other people. This portfolio seeks to bring together a group of artists who are interested in sharing their own creative process of developing a printed edition. As a component of the portfolio, each artist will be asked to photo-document various stages of their print’s development, as a way of providing greater insight into individual methods of creation. The photos will be collected and presented digitally alongside of the editioned prints. A CD of approximately 15 – 20 images showing process documentation will be required along with submission of the finished edition.
EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY
Organized by Justin Diggle
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 441
This portfolio asks participants to consider what privacy means today. We live in a world where our sense of privacy is being drastically changed if not irreversibly eroded. The exponential growth of communication technologies, digital storage, CCTV cameras, social media, and digital cameras, has made a dramatic and beneficial change to our lives, but at a cost. Cameras and phones have GPS tracking, as do many new cars. Stores can track customer habits, via a phone signal, as they browse and drones are now so small and cheap they can be used by private individuals, and as I recently read by paparazzi. Does our use of certain technologies influence what we do? There has been a growth in reality programs, the sharing and posting of photos and videos (legal or not), and many people do choose to share their lives publicly. What is privacy?
RANDOMLY ON PURPOSE
Organized by Tatiana Potts and Kelsey Stephenson
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA HALLWAY CASE 431
Random – “made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision.”
The participants of this portfolio are encouraged to explore playing with chance in their process of creating print images. What happens if you begin your work from an object, a theme, or process and then explore what happens when chance is introduced? When does chance become a conscious decision? How does the image making process become both purposeful, and yet still remain open to introduced elements of play and chance? This is an invitational exchange. Invited participants include professors, printmaking artists and graduates from University of Tennessee, University of North Carolina, Indiana University, University of Alberta (Canada) and University Presov, (Slovakia). This exhibition will be designed to showcase what different avenues of approach to image making and problem solving the printmaking community can explore. The exchange is open to both traditional and new printmaking media, allowing use of variable editions and combinations of digital or alternative materials.
OTHER PORTFOLIOS FEATURED DURING THE CONFERENCE
ACROSS THE GLOBE: INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION OF CONTEMPORARY STUDENT PRINTMAKING
Organized by Mariana Smith
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 325
This portfolio is comprised of prints by students working on their postgraduate or undergraduate degree at fifteen participating institutions in nine countries across the world, showcasing the latest directions in contemporary printmaking. The portfolio presents student works from programs in Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.
DOUBLE BUBBLE: 40 MILE RADIUS X2
Organized by Sarah Pike and Denise Saint-Onge
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA 441
This portfolio explores notions of interconnection and social isolation through the metaphor of the double bubble, a mathematical term that describes a pair of spheres that intersect. Double bubbles are close but separate while sharing a membrane of intersection. The goal of this portfolio is to use the physical nature of printmaking and the connectivity of technology to build intersections between artists living in a 40-mile radius from Troy, NY and a 40-mile radius from Bennington, VT that will ultimately converge in Tennessee at the 2015 Conference.
DRAWN FROM THE McCLUNG MUSEUM
Organized by Sydney Cross
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: MCCLUNG MUSEUM
This portfolio is an innovative exhibition project involving 27 artists, each of whom will produce original prints in response to objects from the collection of the McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture. The exhibition will pair the objects and the prints to address how we perceive and interpret art, science and culture. Like the museum itself, the objects are varied, ranging from a Mastodon Mandible and an Ibis Mummy, to a Victorian Hair Necklace and an Ojibwa Apron.
FROM TIME TO TIME
Organized by The Department of Art and Design, University of Alberta.
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: KCC PARK CONCOURSE
2015 marks the 50th anniversary of the Department of Art and Design at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada and the 45 anniversary of its studio (MFA) program, the oldest in the country. Since 1970, over eighty students have earned MFA degrees from the Department of Art and Design`s internationally renowned Printmaking Division and many have moved on to highly successful careers as artists, teachers, writers and curators both in Canada and around the world. This portfolio of twenty-seven prints by some of the divisions most accomplished alumni from 1974-2008, has been organized as part of the Department of Art and Design`s 50th anniversary celebrations; to honor the team of professors, contract instructors, technicians and artists-in-residence who have contributed to the success of the printmaking program over the years and in special recognition of the contribution of University of Alberta Professor Emeritus (1971-2006) Walter Jule, recipient of the 2015 Southern Graphics Council International Excellence in Teaching Award.
TERRITORIAL LIMITS
Organized by Noell El Farol
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: AA HALLWAY CASE 441
In the midst of technological changes and the economic jolts of a globalized world, culture is seen as both a currency and a vital evaluation between the past and the contemporary to formulate and reinforce identity. The Philippines has strands of identity that are interwoven from Latin, American, and Asian cultures. Much of these overlapping cultures have made the Philippines a curious case in the Asian metanarrative. This exploration of identity is also related to Pilipino printmaking. For a medium that has its deep roots in history, how can printmaking be articulated as contemporary? Considering that printmaking is not an “indigenous” art form in the Philippines, how do we utilize this influence to create work uniquely Pilipino? Organized by The Philippine Association of Printmakers (PA, this portfolio addresses issues of identity and the negotiation between the then and the now.
WONDER WOMEN
Organized by Amanda Knowles and Lenore Thomas
ON DISPLAY THROUGHOUT THE CONFERENCE: KCC PARK CONCOURSE
Wonder Women is a portfolio organized to celebrate and honor Frances Myers as an educator and mentor. This is the second all female portfolio Amanda Knowles and Lenore Thomas have organized. For this second incarnation we have included only women who attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison as a graduate student under Frances. While we cannot possibly include all the women Frances has influenced over the years, we have chosen a group that extends over the breadth of time Frances taught. She has inspired so many students to be makers over her tenure as a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This portfolio was originally organized upon the occasion of Frances' retirement, and was exhibited at the 2013 Southern Graphics Council International Conference, and is now being shown in memorial to this extraordinary artist and educator.
Organized by Dottie Habel
Philanthropic heroes rise to the occasion in unexpected ways. Recently, the University of Tennessee’s School of Art became the beneficiary of an exceptional gesture to ensure the future and stability of our Artist-in-Residence program, now in its 32nd The University’s “Big Orange – Big Ideas” slogan fits this fund-raising project initiated by our alumni—Wade Guyton ’95, Meredyth Sparks ’94, and Josh Smith ’98—to a T! Their really BIG IDEA was to produce a series of Limited Edition Art Boxes with an initial offering to donors to the School of Art A.I.R. campaign. September 2014 marked the first exhibition of the works of art included in the Boxes at The UT Downtown Gallery under the title AIR of UT, in reference to Duchamp’s “Air de Paris” (1919) and the inclusion of this in the artist’s later Boîte-en-valise as well as to Wallace Stevens’ poem “Anecdote of the Jar” (1919) about Tennessee. The Limited Edition Art Boxes form a suite of three, customized boxes of digital prints produced by 30 artists—either alumni or former UT Artists-in-Residence, selected by alumni curators, Guyton, Sparks, and Smith who also contributed work and customized their boxes. The printed works measure 16 x 19”, and the edition is of 100.
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