For Diana Guerrero-Maciá, an artist working in the expanded fields of painting and textiles, to work in print became an exercise in "letting the way inform the outcome." In a series of studio sessions at Process/Process, the artist played with inks mixed to an array of colors inspired by her palette, experimented with Ben Day dots, cut and placed shapes of paper, and handpainted films to overlay these forms.

This work emerges from the artist’s interest in the social, economic, and humanist history of flowers over time. Referencing seventeenth century “Tulipmania” in Holland (when a virus produced rare and speculative striped tulips) she asked herself, “can abstraction break a flower in a way to signify a viral activity?”

With the intention to make “something like a flower, exploded,” the artist brought swatches of hand-dyed fabrics–the same colors she is using in her current bodies of work–to be matched within the productive limitations of ink. Out of large paper sheets printed with these colors, Guerrero-Maciá cut shapes, taping them into provisional forms. Ben Day dots introduced the visual language of commercial printing to allude to the warp and weft of a woven canvas. And in building the composition, Guerrero-Maciá left traces of her activity: gestures of dripping ink, for example, and the illusion of masking tape. Reflecting on working in the print shop, Guerrero-Maciá observed, “a print is made sequentially … I blew things up and put them back together - which is a little bit how I work in the studio.”

Sky Blue Poppy and Dusk Poppy connect to the artist’s current interests in minimal, singular florals. Abstract forms come to Guerrero-Maciá from a distillation of many sources, so for her, it is fitting to use a flower symbolic of memorial in a time of crisis. She notes, “Poppies are symbols of peace and death and/or a memorial. Flowers are temporal, sexy, evocative, and resistant; they are economic and social-political drivers of culture.”