Inaugural Portfolio: New prints by ten artists living and working in the United States.

For Gaza, Earth, Abdalian reproduced the first photographic representations of the Earth, taken from the Apollo 10 in 1969, as a photo intaglio print on paper debossed from a plate wrapped in gauze. Etymologists speculate that the word gauze may itself derive from the city of Gaza, a historic center of weaving. Others point to the French “gaze” or, in Arabic “qaz” meaning “raw silk.” The geographical diversity of these possible origins charts a path for considering our own interconnectedness. 

Alberto Aguilar has produced hundreds of ink drawings on yellow mini legal pads. 06.01.2024 (After 02.02.2024) takes as its starting point the drawing 09.23.11. For this composition, the artist tore a corner off of the sheet of a mini legal pad and then drew its likeness on that sheet itself, fastened with a hand-drawn pin. 06.01.2024 (After 02.02.2024) offers an opportunity to reflect on the illusory nature of the print itself, serving too as a legend to Aguilar’s decades-long social practice.

Adjust your eyes began as a pencil drawing on Yupo paper, inspired by a vintage snapshot of her father. The creative process turned the photograph into a fluid composition of shapes and texture which became the beginning point for the screenprint. Through the proofing process, Alvarez reimagined the pencil marks as separate layers of ink, building up towards a print of surprising character, rich with texture and depth of color. A green form playfully escapes the print's right edge.

A resurgence of flowers as subject matter in contemporary art was recently described by critic Amanda Fortini as “slyly radical.” In this way, I Am yours serves a dual purpose for the artist—it is a message to a loved one and a positive affirmation to oneself. As viewers, we understand flowers– here set in a vase against the artist’s glyphs– as timeless and unfixed vessels for meaning. The artist draws inspiration from Asian prints, Botero, and Jacob Lawrence.

The subject of Alex Bradley Cohen’s work is his everyday life, and he often intimately portrays his friends. Place #1 developed first as a drawing alongside a recent body of paintings in which Cohen examined the social dynamics of life in his Chicago neighborhood. Depicting moments that are intimate and collective, Cohen frames people working and socializing within the city itself. Cohen is known for buoyantly colorful painting, but in this etching, color is profoundly absent.

In Untitled, Grabner’s gingham grid is magnified and cropped along embossed edges. A kozo and hemp paper applied with Chine-collé introduces organic texture to an exacting impression. Since 2015, Michelle Grabner has re-introduced the gingham pattern into her paintings and relief sculptures. Her approach is iterative and exploratory: process takes the form of repetition, contemplation, and the manipulation of materials as a reflection on the patterns of daily life.

Belonging: The Other Shadows is a special, two-part print. Through a meticulous color mixing process each of the five colors that Metzger used for the series of paintings Belonging (The Shadows) (based on an AC/DC album cover) is reproduced as screenprints in the form of a color swatch guide. When a collector acquires it, an installation is executed based on a color selection: ink is custom mixed and a monochromatic shadow is printed over a collector’s wall.

Parts of Speech is a short narrative, a sentence really, about ambiguity. It is set in an aquatic environment and assisted by the edition’s wash of cyan blue dye. They, the subject, is an indeterminate pronoun, not only in relation to gender, but also in relation to species. Aloofish and standoffish refer back to they, but are the words adjectives that describe behavior, or are they nouns that name they as a kind of fish?  There is intentional variation between each print in the edition.