Green On Red Gallery is pleased to announce Phase, an exhibition of new works by John Graham. This is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery since 2008.
“Though in the genus of Print these new works are essentially drawings, print methods making drawings. I’m interested in qualities particular to the printmaking process, the way elements are layered for example, the emphasis on alignments, on mirroring, and multiplicity. Printmakers always seem to be up against limits. The sheet of paper, the printing press, the materials and processes used, while vehicles for expression, also seem to contain it. Boundaries provide definition but I also hope to find ways through or around them, to see beyond them, with sight sharpened by them at the same time.
Etching makes a bitten line that when printed sits up on the paper’s surface. The objective quality of this raised line helps distance it from the world of illusion and bring it closer to the material world. A group of five large etchings are called, ‘Abat-Voix’*. They are made in four adjoining sections, with dense fields of tightly packed lines juxtaposed against each other. Similar in format, surfaces – black (zinc plates) or silver (copper plates) – are differentiated by the specific characteristics of the metals and drawing tools used to make them. Made through a combination of autographic and mechanical process, the work requires a machine-like attention, but benefits from my not being a machine, or from my being only an imperfect one, a machine with feelings.
Smaller works, ‘Tests/Arrangement’, are made from test plates for the larger ones. Based on familiar tropes, off-settings, and doublings of various kinds, each work is made from combinations of repeated elements, unique iterations carrying the referent of other possibilities within them.
More info on -www.greenonredgallery.com/exhibition.php?intProjectID=113
