Selected Works by Mark Wilson and Phyllis McGibbon
March 31 – May 21, 2019
Artist Bios
This exhibition brings together works on paper by two artists who work side by side and have a sustained affiliation with the medium printmaking.
Mark Wilson teaches lithography at Boston University and has also taught printmaking at Maine College of Art, Massachusetts College of Art and the University of Georgia study abroad program in Cortona Italy. He holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and became a certified professional lithographer at the Tamarind Institute in New Mexico.
Phyllis McGibbon is the Elizabeth Christy Kopf Professor of Art at Wellesley College, where she teaches all areas of printmaking and drawing and currently serves as Director of Studio Art. She earned her MFA from the University of Wisconsin- Madison and taught at Wesleyan University, Pomona College, and the Claremont Graduate University before joining the Wellesley Art Department.
While both artists have extensive experience printing editions, they are most interested in the way that printed images may be distilled, inverted, and translated to generate new readings (aka Inklings). Both embrace the graphic potential of understatement, repeatability and echoes but do so by different means. Many of Wilson’s images begin with an observed subject which is distilled through a process of drawing and printing. He utilizes a reductive monotype process, in which an oil-based ink is rolled onto a smooth plastic plate and worked subtractively by hand before printing. McGibbon’s collage-based works explore the additive potential of press work by juxtaposing various kinds of previously printed material, from proofs to printing plates, as a way to prompt fresh image associations and new inklings.
Artist Statement
Phyllis McGibbon
My work involves a range of studio methods, including drawings, handmade books, constructed objects and site built installations. The collage pieces on view here, collectively titled “Some Thoughts about Haloes” are composed of remnants and ghost elements from earlier print projects, many of them involving quotations from art history as well as vernacular print culture. Print is a medium in which artists may look back (to the trial proof, the color swatch, or historical method) as well as forward as an image coalesces and begins to multiply. I find something poetic in the repetitive processes of a print studio and am fascinated with the way that images may be separated, distilled and compressed to register (visually and metaphorically) in new ways.
“Some Thoughts about Haloes” addresses notions of doubt, uncertainty and empathy at a time when so many aspects of social and scientific progress appear newly vulnerable. In the broadest sense, I am interested in the way that images and ideas travel and mutate, not only through various iterations of an artist’s work, but also through cultural moments and various artist’s hands. I’m intrigued by the remnants of graphic production (i.e. working proofs, registration guides, slip sheets, stencils) and how these items retain a creative spark, generating fresh juxtapositions, associations and insights when viewed from another angle. This self-reflexive aspect of studio investigation allows me to recognize links and extensions to projects that might otherwise appear unrelated. Developing this work as an open-ended series allows me to intuit new visual connections and conceptual implications over time.