Exhibitions

J.C. Heywood: A Life in Layers

Please follow this link to view the online exhibiton.

Carl (J.C.) Heywood has been creating art for over forty years. His passion and devotion to printmaking has become a life’s work. Based on the 2008 exhibit and catalogue by the Burnaby Art Gallery and Geraldine Davis, this retrospective exhibition chronicled Heywood’s evolution as a Canadian artist.

Available in English and French.

Lynda Cuddy – A Exhibition Series 

The inspiration for this work came from an intersection of my interests in magazine design, typography and photography.  I had, prior to creating the prints, been working on the feasibility of starting-up a printmaking magazine and had spent many hours pouring over magazines that I appreciated for their great design, great typography and great photography. Around the same time, I had taken a number of photographs on Granville Island of the end supports of barricades that I saw leaning up against a corrugated steel wall.  They looked like a row of large orange capital letter A's.  I was beginning to see typography in places other than magazines.  I was even able to find one abandoned barricade A, all weathered and worn, which later became the subject of one of the large mezzotint prints. 

This A form became part coat hanger, part dressmaker's Judy, on which to try on art styles, part cartoon character appearing in situations that posed some technical printmaking challenge.  Could I make very large mezzotint prints, could I print well large flats of difficult colours in lithography, could I make large linocuts?  It was a time of exploration.   

One of the first prints in the series was the Madonna print.  At the time, a number of other print artists at the Malaspina Printmakers Studio were making Madonna images.  I decided to jump on the bandwagon.  Around that same time, Madonna's hit song Like A Virgin was playing on the radio and I thought it was a hilarious and irreverent title for my Madonna lithograph.  Rather than a baby Jesus, my Madonna held a capital letter A (A is for Art!).  Another print in the series was a large linocut of this barricade form decorated with apple views (A is also for apple!) ala other artists and block printing styles including wood engraving.  There is the ongoing dialogue between type, alphabet illustration and word play that followed the form through the series.  For instance, take the dry point print, Model A.  I made a small cardboard model of the A form since I got tired of lugging around the actual barricade end.  As I was making the model, I suddenly felt inspired to make a print illustration of the model.  The title for the piece came from childhood memories of visiting the Henry Ford Museum where I saw Model T cars.  Sometimes inspiration came from word plays.  Such was the case with the lithograph titled A Symphony.  I was humming a Supremes song, I grew up listening to Motown music, and the phrase, “ I hear a symphony” made me think of an orchestra pit and where the musicians sit. And the idea for the print just popped into my head. And so it went as I made each successive print. Sometimes I would simply study an art style and see if I could just slip it like a dress onto the form. A Style and American Streamline are examples. The series really was about immersion in print media and personal exploration to find my own style of art making. It was, from the outset, intended to be a great deal of fun.

Gallery

 

 
Linda Cuddy
A Typography
etching
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
Apple Movements 
linocut
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
Like A Virgin
lithograph
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
A Symphony
lithograph
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
Concrete Jungle
lithograph
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
A Style
lithograph
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
An Exhibition
linocut
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
American Streamline
lithograph
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Linda Cuddy
Model A
drypoint
1986
City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection
Gift of the Artist

Deborah Koenker: The Mexican Night

In 1980 when I came across Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s The Mexican Night travel journal in a bookstore, his title summed up the sensuous mystery and magic I’d recently experienced while living in Mexico for 5 months. Intensely visual and sensory, my travels in the states of Nayarit, Jalisco, Michoacan and Guanajuato, visits to Cora and Huichol indigenous villages and the intensity of Mexico City resulted in this series of 13 prints produced between 1981-1983, also titled The Mexican Night. Frida Kahlo’s house in Coyoacan, patios, haciendas, gardens, deserts, weddings, shrines, marimba and samba music, wildly imaginative crafts and ceramics--produced, quite literally, from dreams -- translated into a vocabulary of transforming visual elements: ‘leaf’ to ‘eye’ to ‘footstep’. Using movement, colour and a loose drawing style I sought to convey an immediacy that belied the laborious lithographic, etching and silkscreen processes.

Thirty years of return visits and a large Mexican family acquired through marriage followed that first encounter--thirty years of radical changes in Mexican culture and in my own awareness. In 2007 I produced Ten Digit Suite, comprised of 10 silkscreen editions based on Las Desaparecidas/Missing, an installation work done in collaboration with villagers in Tapalpa, Jalisco. Las Desaparecidas/Missing focuses on the largely un-investigated murders and disappearances of hundreds of Mexican girls and women in the border city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua--mostly poor factory workers employed in the ‘maquiladoras’, the assembly plants that mushroomed as a result of NAFTA. Selected from the 84 hand-embroidered fingerprints done by the Tapalpa participants in protest against the Ciudad Juarez murders and in support of the victims’ families, these printed images are organic and multi-referential; not immediately recognizable as fingerprints. As innocuous as they seem they point to a darker, more brutal and violent aspect of ‘the Mexican night’.

Deborah Koenker
March 2008

Gallery
Click on photos to enlarge