“2022”: A show of new prints @newleafeditions, May 2023

The title piece of the exhibit “2022” was drawn from a moment in Porto Portugal experienced at about the same time as the Russian invasion of Ukraine occurred.

2022 a show of prints being exhibited at New Leaf Editions Gallery on Granville Island in Vancouver, Canada. The show makes explicit the connection between the artist and the influence the broader social, environmental, and global context has on their work. The images are drawn from the experience of living through the past few years: of the pandemic, heat-domes and atmospheric rivers; watching from afar as wars are waged, refugees cross frontiers, and an increasingly poisoned social and political discourse prevails. The images are composites of experiences and pictures captured and imagined by the artist, but also recognizes in a world awash in imagery the artist encounters the world through the lens of that media. Some pieces are a product of collecting and collaging the news stream into new works.  The exhibit also deploys the dissonant voice of printmaking and recognizes the debt to an approach that has a history of engaging audiences through the narrative form in the zeitgeist of “now”.

“Protest” is an example of the collaging and collecting imagery from media and re-appropriating them into an image. The image was drawn as the artists response to the protests taking black as part of #blacklives movement and protest in Kashmir and Venezuela.
At the height of the #blackllives movement the critique from the right was focused on the destruction of property. The hypocrisy of this sentiment is in part the subject of the picture that draws comparisons between the assertion of the rights of people from the streets in 2020 and scenes from the stage play Les Miserables that celebrates the birth of democracy form distant history.
“Raft”
“Heat Dome (cult of youth)” The picture was drawn during the heat wave that struck the west coast in the summer of 2021.
“Pre-drinking: Grad 2020” a toast and tribute to the cancellation of graduation ceremonies for graduates of 2020.
“Penelope: and her suitors” The image was inspired by a play by an Irish company that played in Brooklyn. The story of Penelope is re-told her as her suitors fight for her attention and her hand in marriage to be consummated upon the completion of her shawl that she knits during the day and unravels each night. Odysseus appears in the shadows in the back ground. The image image seems an appropriate metaphor for the present day.
“Drone Strike” at a time that the west talks talks contemptuously about international norms in the Ukraine we must be reminded that we continue to kill from the skies at enormous human cost.
“Collapse”
“Interior” the image is drawn from an apartment recently vacated because of the death of its occupants. The pandemic rendered countless spaces like this one. The emptiness of the image speaks to the loss both personal and intimate and socially and culturally.
“Koufinisi #2”