Blueprints at Centre3 in Hamilton

The five artists collected by curator Chris Saba under the banner of Blueprints challenge common expectations of what printmaking can both accomplish and signify. Works that bend the printed multiple to serve as sculpture, video, and painting push the physical limits of Centre 3's reconfigured gallery space with the heft of printmaking's mutability as method, multiple, and medium by which commodities are duplicated, deified, and undermined.



Colin Lyons, Ogilvie Flour Mills Ltd., Dow Brewery Ltd., and Silo No. 5. Etchings, 2008 (photo: Clarence Ngoh)

This latter concern is slowly gleaned from Dax Morrison's silkscreened prints of Canadian art gallery floor plans. A cryptic red area in each muted diagram catches the eye, straining the memory to re-walk these buildings and connect that red with the gallery's gift shop. It's a subtle yet pointed gesture, not unlike Christian Chapman's mixed media clash of Scotland's Loch Lomond with a wilderness closer to home, or Carlos Granados-Ocón's deconstructed sketchbook of found relics deemed worthy of reproduction in the past, now brought low by a tacking of tape and the ravages of time.

Jennifer Linton's The Disobedient Dollhouse is unapologetically Victorian (with an equally brazen nod to Japanese ukiyo-e of the shunga tradition), inhabited by the same anthropomorphic characters and lusty cephalopod that populate her paper puppet animations. If Linton revels in the repressed domicile of the Victorians, Colin Lyons resurrects its soot-smeared drudgery with his moody etchings of factories folded into fragile paper versions of their former selves. In both artists, we see the darker machinations of the mass reproduction of things and ideas: potentially infinite copies of a cycle broken by the artist's metamorphosis of print into a precarious post-medium house of cards.


Centre 3: http://centre3.com/centre3upgradesite/visual-arts/current-exhibitions
Blueprints continues until March 1.


Stephanie Vegh is a Hamilton-based visual artist and writer whose criticism has appeared in Scotland's Map Magazine, Canadian Art, C Magazine, and Hamilton Arts & Letters, in addition to her own blog. Her drawings and installations have shown most recently at the upArt Contemporary Art Fair and Nathaniel Hughson Gallery in Hamilton. She is the Executive Director of the Hamilton Arts Council and a member of the Curatorial Committee for Hamilton's annual Supercrawl. She is also Akimblog's Hamilton correspondent and can be followed @Stephanie_Vegh on Twitter.