Making an Impression
A Monotype Guild of New England Juried Members’ Exhibition
Cove Street Arts
71 Cove Street
Portland, ME
May 16 – July 13, 2024
Virtual Reception: Wednesday, June 19, 2024 at 7-8:30pm ET
Juror: Elizabeth A. Jabar
MGNE is excited to announce the award winners for the exhibition, Making an Impression: The Monotype and Monoprint, at Cove Street Arts in Portland, Maine from May 16 to July 13, 2024. These winners were selected by juror Elizabeth Jabar from the 41 prints by 35 artists exhibited, each exploring the unique processes of monotype and monoprint techniques.
Elizabeth Jabar stated “The prints in Making an Impression display the artist’s close relationship and observations of and to the world on all levels. Local and global, individual and collective. They also highlight our lives in the current context and what is happening under our feet and across the world. Images are rendered in vivid color, texture, surface, and touch using various printmaking materials and techniques and diverse visual languages. These works invite us into a multi-sensory experience of a world of rupture, uncertainty, and displacement amid beauty.”
FIRST PLACE: Susan Denniston, Mapping at the Edge, Monoprint.
Susan Denniston’s print suspends two realities in dynamic tension-a precarious imbalance of our world held by the embrace of a quilt fragment. The piecing of image, color and form further amplifies a strong sense of fragmentation, while the stitching holding the bottom of the form is an acknowledgment of fragility and attempt at wholeness. – Elizabeth Jabar, Juror
Artist Statement: My work addresses ideas of decay and transformation, mending and repair; giving new life to discarded or broken things. I often work with fragments of vintage quilts, gently breaking the stitches, deconstructing the remains. The imprint of these tattered and torn pieces evokes a sense of ravaged fields, turbulent water, and an unsettled sky; a sense of our land in flux. As I work, I draw a thread from the past to the present and contemplate a future.
SECOND PLACE: Ellen Roberts, Collecting Observations, Monotype.
‘Collecting Observations’ by Ellen Roberts is a meditation of the landscape using abstracted forms and textures. The scale of the print creates a powerful multisensory experience and washes over the viewer. There is a tactile quality created by the combination of techniques and printing surface that heightens the sensory nature of the work. – Elizabeth Jabar, Juror
Artist Statement: Living in Maine, I am fortunate to be able to examine the ever changing colors, textures and patterns of nature. This inspires my ideas and imagination. My work is often created with monotype prints forged from the evolution of techniques previously explored –– with hints from my experiences with sculptural ceramics, dyed fibers, stitching, and handwoven wall pieces.
THIRD PLACE: Lisa Barthelson, “wallforms 1, art in isolation, family debris,” Monoprints.
Lisa Barthelson’s unique sculptural printed work uses playful colorful forms to explore narratives of family and our endangered natural environment. Using discarded everyday materials, the Family Debri series questions the culture of consumption and gives materials new life. The process of transformation is heightened by the physical traces in the stitching and layering of print fragments. – Elizabeth Jabar, Juror
Artist Statement: As I approached working away from my studio during the Covid 19 ‘stay at home’ order, I elected to work small, using much of the material that I already had at hand, including family debris monoprints, created by layering inked printing plates with my family’s permanent and more ephemeral detritus, a record of the mundane and obsolete. The intimate scale felt reminiscent of at home domestic arts and offered meditative comfort in the making. I completed a series of small family debris ‘art in isolation (aii)’ mixed media prints, that eventually numbered almost 50 ‘aii’ works. As the pandemic period continued, I expanded the range of the series to include larger quilt-like work created by piecing together monoprints and incorporating printed collage and stitching. In addition, double and single sided prints served as components for building three dimensional sculptural forms that are ever increasing in number, size and complexity. The folded paper vessels are stitched on and stitched together to create abstract sculptures that push the limits of paper, ink and thread. I’ll never forget the pandemic, a paradigm shifting time, but in the end, ‘art in isolation’ has been soul and sanity saving homework.
HONORABLE MENTIONS:
Susan Osgood, Map of Water 5, Monoprint.
Artist Statement: Exploring the concept of mapping and envisioning a series of prints, colors of blue came to mind − Prussian, ultramarine, cobalt, and cerulean. Once the project was underway I realized they were about water and wondered would we someday need a map of water; not a chart for navigation, but rather a diagram of its very essence, telling a mythological tale, a secret life of dark depths, and conveying its serene otherworldliness.
R. Leopoldina Torres, Remnants, Black Bear (Pikes Peak Highway), Monotype.
Artist Statement: For this work, I deconstructed, tore, folded and inked paper/trash found while hiking the summit to Pikes Peak to create a printing matrix on plexi plates. As these materials fall apart through the printing process, it created a singular and unique impression on paper, a remnant.
This monotype print is part of an ongoing print series titled “Remnants.” I deconstruct discarded materials from cultural institutions, museums and parks to create works that explicate the ways in which we consume culture and produce meaning. Through the printing process, often impressions of words and images from the original materials are transferred to the prints, leaving a residue. As a contemporary artist of color and a visual anthropologist, I am particularly interested in what is left behind in these remnants, exposing what is seen and unseen.
Kathleen Wynn, “Displaced,” Monotype.
Artist Statement: The piece was created using yupo paper, stencils and collaged prints. Printed on Hahnemuhle paper.
View the full exhibition web gallery here!
Download the gallery brochure with juror and artist statements here!
Making an Impression: Events Calendar
MGNE Virtual Reception & Artists Talk
Wednesday, June 19, 2024 at 7-8:30pm ET
Join us for a virtual tour of the juried exhibition Making an Impression: The Monotype and Monoprint at Cove Street Arts. We will be joined by juror Elizabeth Jabar and the award winning artists from the exhibition for a presentation of their works in the exhibition.
Register here!
Opening Reception at Cove Street Arts
Thursday, May 16 at 5-7pm
71 Cove Street, Portland ME 04101
SPECIAL THANKS: SALLY DION
Sally Dion will be stepping down as chair of exhibitions for MGNE at the end of May. We are immensely grateful to Sally for all her work with heading our exhibitition team for the past couple years.
Sally has been instrumental in keeping the guild thriving and has made a great impact on the community with exhibitions like Ecology at the Silver Center at the Museum of the White Mountains, Plymouth State University and Lasting Impressions Juried Exhibition at Thayer Academy in Braintree, MA.
We are grateful for all the dedication, hard work and support she has provided the Guild. We will be formally recognizing her and her achievements at the Cove Street Arts opening reception on Thursday, May 16. We hope you can join us.
Image Detail: Susan Denniston, Mapping at the Edge, Monoprint.
