Guttenberg Arts presents Rob Swainston's "AMERICA IS REALLY HARD TO SEE" at Spring / Break 2020

America Is Really Hard To See borrows the iconic figure of ‘Boss Tweed’—a notoriously corrupt NYC political boss and real estate titan—from an 1871 political cartoon titled ‘THE BRAINS’ by Tomas Nast.  Nast was relentless in his exposure of political corruption and capitalist greed, and was instrumental in Tweed’s eventual demise.  Originally intended for newspaper circulation, Swainston reinterprets this image as a large-scale multi-layered woodblock.  Contemporary figures in power-suits flank Nast’s historic caricature of greed.  Backlighting produces shifting moiré patterns as the viewer moves past the image.  Swainston calls this ‘the unstable image’ and posits this effect as analogous to power’s disappearing act in contemporary society.  In an accompanying room-sized stop-animation video, the artist attempts to ‘confront the boss’ but his rebellion is short lived.

Artist Bio

Born and raised in rural Pennsylvania and based in New York, Rob Swainston is an Assistant Professor of Art+Design in Printmaking at Purchase College and Master Printer for collaborative printshop Prints of Darkness.  His art intersects printmaking, painting, installation, and sculpture.  Rob received a BA in Social Science from Hampshire College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.  Rob claims: “All images are historically negotiated assemblages between humans, machines, materials, and social structures.  In a society where social knowledge and power have become pure image, the print technologies historically central to this transformation can act as double-agent.  Artists working in print media can be chameleons moving between image-makers and image-reproducers.”  Rob has been awarded numerous awards and residencies including Skowhegan, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and the Fine Arts Work Center.  Solo and group exhibitions include Marginal Utility, David Krut Projects, Bravin Lee Programs, Socrates Sculpture Park, Smack Mellon, Munson Williams Proctor Museum of Art, Provincetown Art Association and Museum, IPCNY, Canada Gallery, Queens Museum, and the Bronx Museum. 

Rob Swainston

America Is Really Hard To See

Installation, woodblock print on poly-knit fabric with light, 87” x 120” x 8” wide and Stop-animation video, 10 min 38 sec long with Eve Sussman, camera assistance and Russ Spitovsky, illustration assistance

Spring / Break Art Fair NYC 2020

Guttenberg Arts Special Project Space

Thank you to The Print Club of New York

Thank you Mona Rubin and the Print Club of New York for their studio visit! It was incredible to get the chance to showcase a handful of our printmakers to their group! You’re all welcome back anytime!

Click here to check out the great work they do for artists http://printclubofnewyork.org/

Made Here Fall 2019 Press Release

(Guttenberg NJ) Guttenberg Arts Gallery is pleased to present MADE HERE: FALL 2019 a group exhibition of our current Artists in Residence; Mary Ancel, Bruno Nadalin and Komikka Patton. On view December 7th - December 31st, 2019. The works included in MADE HERE: FALL 2019 were created during the artist’s 3 month Space & Time Artist Residency at Guttenberg Arts.  Guttenberg Arts will host an opening reception for MADE HERE: FALL 2019 on Saturday December 7th from 7pm - 9pm.

Mary Ancel is an artist who works in textiles, print and photography. Her work indulges in excess and obsession, using bright colors, sparkles and rainbows in order to delight and distract. At the same time wistful and celebratory, it navigates her strained relationships to both beauty and loss. During her residency, Ancel produced a body of works on paper that combines her background in printmaking and photography with the materials and techniques from her sculptural practice. These works blend photographic imagery with more abstract textural elements in order to emphasize their fantastical content. Drawing inspiration from embellished Indian painted photographs, the decoration upon these works have been integrated into the imagery, calling attention to the shifting perspectives of illusion and reality. The themes of these works center around thresholds, portals and passageways to other realms; through both the imagery and the material combinations, Ancel generates a series of densely embellished realities.

Bruno Nadalin’s work focuses on the grotesque and monstrous as an avenue towards expressing and exorcising social and personal anxieties. Nadalin’s art is primarily narrative in approach, although the conditions of these narratives tend to be ambiguous and undefined. At Guttenberg Arts, Nadalin developed a series of etchings, utilizing hard ground, soft ground, and aquatint,  which feature human forms undergoing traumas of definition. The figures in these pieces push upon one another, intrude into one another’s space, sharing limbs, their features shifting and melding, like the thieves in Canto XXV of Dante’s Inferno. There seems to be an attempt at connection between the beings in these etchings, yet this often appears to be thwarted or channeled into aggression, while the nebulous space that surrounds them highlights the disquieting nature of their interaction and resists a context which may help to ground and thereby reconcile them.

Pulling on Afrofuturist themes, Komikka Patton’s motifs relate to Black motherhood and motherships. In a post-apocalyptic world that reconstructs societal hierarchies and authorities with a mark of an “X” and brings forth a voice to a truth that seems to have been denied access to a sanctioned stage. Patton has recently returned from overseas and her most contemporary work cycles narratives that explore comprehensive visions of futuristic Utopias/Dystopias that converge at the intersection of awareness, power, and emancipation; anchoring them with direct relevance to contemporary social issues in ways that communicate their (Blacks) participation in, and alienation from the larger world. Using drawing, printmaking, and collage gives me opportunity to tap into the world of the fictional, surreal, and mythical. And worlds are born, realms that are stories of survival and that seem to be made up of a biologically ingrained endurance that boils down to skin color. Mother was born out of the unknown as it relates to ancestry, self, having a single black mom, fear of motherhood, and mortality.  At Guttenberg Arts, Patton is interested in perceptions of time in relation to Blackness. Just how fluid is time when wrapped in traume, what does it mean when the past does not stay in the past, and what happens when the past is also the future.

Prior to the Opening Reception to MADE HERE: FALL 2019 on December 7th, Guttenberg Arts will host a Holiday art sale in support of their new glass blowing facilities (3pm - 7pm). Exhibition: December 7, 2019 - December 31st, 2019; Opening Reception on Saturday December 7th, 7-9pm. 

Guttenberg Arts programming is made possible by a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a division of the Department of State, and administered by the Hudson County Office of Cultural & Heritage Affairs, Thomas A. Degise, Hudson County Executive & the Hudson County Board of Chosen Freeholders. 

Paper Crown Press' latest book featured on the Brian Lehrer Show!

Check out this incredible interview with author Dennis J Bernstein and designer Warren Lehrer on last week’s Brian Lehrer Show!

https://www.wnyc.org/story/seeing-poetry

MADE HERE: Summer 2019 Group Show!