Departments
Arts
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17 July 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 2 |
Arts
MFA print show highlights work of SFA faculty artist
by Marion Sawey
One of the New England artists selected for inclusion in the landmark survey of international contemporary printmaking that has just opened at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston is SFA Assistant Professor of Visual Arts Deborah Cornell.
The exhibition, PhotoImage: Printmaking 60s to 90s, showcases 110 prints by an international cast of 72 artists, including Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Richard Hamilton, and others who have been influential in their creative use of photographic imagery.
Cornell's work is represented by the print Blood and Water: Transposition, one of a series of four aquatints acquired by the MFA earlier this year.
"It is wonderful for me to have my work included in such a historical show," Cornell says. "The exhibition is very important because the large area of endeavor in printmaking that it covers is rarely documented. Also, by showing the interconnection between the photographic media and printmaking, it demonstrates how printmaking has become a field for the playing out of many issues in contemporary art. This is because printmaking intrinsically covers issues of representation, reproduction versus originality, and the use of adapted imagery, and draws on popular, political, and computer art, as well as the collage tradition."
Turning to her own work, Cornell says that she is not interested in the portrayal aspects of photography. "My interest is in the assistance that the camera can give me in reaching into areas of the visual world that you can't see with the naked eye, such as telescopic or microscopic imagery. For example, my images are of viruses, the surface of the sea from space, artifacts from history, chromosomes and DNA, things that we can't see but which we know are very important to the way we live and to our understanding of the outside world."
The overall thrust of her work is to make a relationship between natural history and human history, she says. "I take images and structure them so that they exist in a contiguous space. This forms a kind of tension between unrelated images to create a new reality.
"Transposition, for example, uses the elegant forms of ocean currents and cells together with the image of a crab deity from Peru and a fossil bat. It joins cultural elements with forms from nature."
The print was selected for the exhibition from Cornell's series of four aquatints by exhibition organizer Clifford S. Ackley, curator of the MFA's department of prints, drawings, and photographs. "He is very fond of Transposition," says Cornell. "I must say I think he made a good choice, because the print sums up all the issues raised in the rest of the suite."
Commenting on the exhibition, Ackley points out that our daily visual environment is increasingly made up of reproduced photographic images in news, advertising, and entertainment. "It should come as no surprise that creative printmakers have made extensive use of this barrage of photographic imagery in their work. The artists in PhotoImage reflect the astonishing and unprecedented diversity of art in the late 20th century."
Techniques used in the exhibition range from traditional woodcuts and lithographs to computer-generated images printed by computer-driven ink jet printers.
"I am an adventurer as far as technique goes. Most of what I do is nontraditional," comments Cornell, who often uses phototransfers of drawings and other images in the technical process she has developed for aquatint. "Printmaking is a very complex medium, an umbrella covering a tremendous range of individual media and technologies. It