UNIVERSAL, exhibition view at Atelier Circulaire, Montreal. ©Photo: Jason Urban
Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban
UNIVERSAL
18 September – 17 October 2014
at Atelier Circulaire, Montréal
It is a representation of purpose.
It is a shared workplace.
It is a place of tools, materials and making.
It is a site of production.
It is where the magic happens.
As artists and collaborators, Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban are interested in the handmade (or in this case, hand-printed) and the duality of actual and virtual, experience and meta-experience. In an increasingly digitized world, traces of the human hand are often revered as signs of authenticity and reality, even when viewed on a screen. For the exhibition, UNIVERSAL, their first large-scale collaborative project, Mutchler and Urban are showing a body of work developed at Artists Image Resource (AIR), Pittsburgh, PA. While in residence at AIR, the pair generated prints and recorded the act of printing, an inherently tactile experience, to be presented as a meta-experience alongside the physical. The creation of three nearly identical prints – a silkscreen, a lithograph, and a woodblock – started an inquiry into the nature of making and the nature of documenting making.
UNIVERSAL is an encounter with the facsimile. Focus shifts here and there to capture glimpse of beauty in the banal, mineralogy, stagecraft and magic. By modifying and reproducing an image from Herbert Bayer’s Chromatic Gate series, commonly reproduced in catalogues in gray scale, the artists are examining the relationship of printed difference and various haptic signatures. Photographs, video, and printed matter serve as documents of the physical experience. While a chunk of raw magnesite, a stack of offset broadsheets, and large-scale images of soft boxes serve as stand-ins for the real, the imagined and the quixotic.
Leslie Mutchler and Jason urban, both holding multiple degrees in printmaking, have been working for several years to make relevant the archaic and dying craft of print. Mutchler’s most recent projects WorkLAB Satellites and TrendFACTORY, are experiential, examining the purpose and functionality of the printed form and the use of handcraft through multi-participatory installations. Urban is co-founder and co-editor of Printeresting.org, a recipient of the 2011 Creative Capital Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, focusing on interesting and relevant contemporary printmaking, print, and print-related issues. Urban’s most recent project, Temporary Monument, printed and installed in Doha, Qatar, explores the expansiveness of printed matter, text and graphic proliferation.
Leslie Mutchler / Jason Urban
UNIVERSAL
18 September – 17 October 2014
Atelier Circulaire
5445, Av. de Gaspé
Espace 105
Montréal, QC
H2T 3B2 Canada
ateliercirculaire.org
Opening hours
Wednesday – Saturday: 12h00 – 17h00
Bayer Book, 2014. Digital Print & Acrylic. ©Photo: Jason Urban
left: Gate (Woodblock) II, 2014; right: Gate (Woodblock) 2014. Digital Print & acrylic. ©Photo: Jason Urban
UNIVERSAL, exhibition view at Atelier Circulaire, Montreal. ©Photo: Jason Urban
Magnesite on Newspaper, 2014. Magnesite, Newspeint & Acrylic. ©Photo: Jason Urban
From left: Universal Gate, 2014, Silkscreen; Universal Gate, 2014, Woodcut; Universal Gate, 2014, Lithograph. ©Photo: Jason Urban
UNIVERSAL, 2014. Video, 6m26s. ©Photo: Jason Urban