Lines of Site: Ideas, Forms and Materialities

Over a period of more than twenty-five years, the printmaking division at the University of Alberta's department of Art and Design has become recognized internationally as a centre for printmaking. This special exhibition celebrates the work of those who have been associated with University of Alberta's printmaking division. Some of these artists, like Liz Ingram, Walter Jule, and Lyndal Osborne, are still instructors and faculty. Others, like Koichi Yamamoto, Marna Bunnell, and Ben Wong, have studied there as graduate students. These artists share a commitment to the idea that the print medium is a form in which artists can still apply high levels of craft, push the creative boundaries of the medium beyond the conventional, and yet simultaneously express effective meanings in a new and fast-changing world. In a deliberate play on the title of the Sightlines symposium of October 1997, Lines of Site alludes to the notions of place, direction, even standpoint of view, hinting at important principles of common cause to which print artists might aspire and by which they might be inspired in a world of increasingly immediate and ephemeral visions.

Desmond Rochfort and Lawrence Smith