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For the last five years, staff members of Zygote Press, Cleveland's artist-run print shop and gallery, have worked with the staff of the Dresden print shop, Grafikwerkstatt, to send Ohio artists to Dresden, and to bring Dresden artists to Cleveland for six-week residencies.
Twenty-five artists participated in the exchange program, and some of the fruits of their labor are currently on view at the Cleveland State University Art Gallery in the exhibition Foreign Affairs.
The exhibit demonstrates the versatility of printmaking. Former Ohio State University art professor Todd DeVriese, who now chairs the Department of Art and Design at Zayed University in Dubai, the United Arab Emirates, was one of the first artists to work in Dresden. DeVriese's Yellow Mouse , a Mickey Mouse image made from collaged atlases and outlined in a field of bright yellow ink, is visually striking, despite the predictably ironic message of the “Disney-ification” of America. DeVriese renders the atlases illegible by piecing together several small sections that include towns, county lines and expansive areas of the west. It is telling that the artist chose to reference the iconic mouse in work he created while in Germany; one wonders whether the gritty authenticity of the former East German city made his homeland seem all the more simulated and homogeneously bland.
The world atlas is also present in the work of Royden Watson, who completed his Dresden residency this past fall. His series of lithographs, You're So Vain, faintly depict the continents from an atlas. The barely discernible imagery, rendered in gray ink on gray paper, is subtly beautiful. In the exhibition catalog, Watson, whose work often centers on the uniformity and standardization of American systems and products, refers to the map image of the U.S. as a “logo shape.” In this series, borders are not represented, and continents are barely discernible, each blending faintly into the next.
This work brilliantly obliterates the logo-like nature of the countries, and, as Watson explains, “Show[s] how delicate and malleable relationships and borders really are.”
Dresden artist Jana Morgenstern's works are abstract, done in dark, cool hues. Her untitled collagraph print is a lush, tactile work, consisting of a series of entwined, transparent bands of pigment. Collagraphs are a printmaker's answer to collage, as the printing surface is built up with added materials and then run through a printing press. The result is a ghostlike effigy of the original materials. Morgenstern's work is collagraphy at its best; luscious lines intersect with translucent strips of washy ink, adding depth to the flat surface of the paper.
Volker Lenkeit, who did his residency in Cleveland in 2002, created some of the show's most stunning works. His untitled ImagOn intaglio/drypoint/chine colle print depicts a classically rendered Biblical scene of a Godlike man guiding a male figure. The image is straight out of the 15th-century European printmaking tradition; the tightly rendered detail, the inclusion the attendant putti , or cherubs, clearly reference the past. Yet Lenkeit annihilates the traditional method and iconography by violently scratching lines over the figures. The energy of this seemingly aggressive act signals a break with European history.
Lenkeit's piece interestingly contrasts with DeVriese's Yellow Mouse. While DeVriese ironically depicts Mickey Mouse, the symbol of American consumption and culture, Lenkeit unabashedly scratches out traditional imagery and technique. DeVriese is aware of the current global influence of American pop culture, and Lenkeit acknowledges Europe's past influence on western culture and thought.
It is interesting to see similar themes and iconography emerge in the works of artists from Dresden and Ohio. Claudia Esslinger incorporates the human skeleton in Dresden Arch, as does Dresden artist Stefan Nestler, in his bold red-and-white untitled print. And, the gritty industrialism of Cleveland is reflected in the prints of Ohioan Matthew Krone and Dresden artist Henry Rademacher.
Foreign Affairs
is a compelling example of the blurring of boundaries between continents
and cultures, underscoring that what we do transcends the humanly ascribed
constructs of countries and borders.