Artists decipher ’85’ for exhibit

As part of the Honolulu Printmakers 85th annual exhibition, local cartoonist Deb Aoki has drawn a beautiful little graphic novel that explains the rich art of printmaking and pays homage to those who pursue the practice. Aoki’s cover illustrates the deep integration of chemistry, physics, manual labor, delicacy and minutia, craft, serendipity and profound aesthetic strategy that goes into the medium.

Don’t be fooled by the zine’s brevity. This is an efficient guide to understanding the broad categories of printing and a key to truly appreciating the staggering variety of techniques, approaches and philosophies that artists employ and that juror Hiroki Morinoue has successfully brought together.

We’ve come a long way from Gutenberg’s first Bibles and Andy Warhol’s technicolor repetitions of Mao and Marilyn Monroe, and very little time is spent revisiting or revising such history. Artists have much more to say, and when they do speak in tones of the popular, idealized or commercial, it still demonstrates a good deal of introspection and an effort to explore various relationships for their own sake: scale to color, pattern to density, technique to message, repetition to singularity, representation to abstraction, and even artist-to-artist collaboration.

What unifies this staggering diversity is the theme of "85," which each artist was invited to interpret.

Sometimes it’s clearly a shoehorn effort (artists are nonconformists, after all), but in the majority of cases there is a conceptual resonance between the work and the numerology. Quinn Donnelly restricts the production of his monotype "Hot Mess II" to 85 strokes of the brush. Allyn Bromley comments on development and change in Hawaii by printing the textures of construction and industrialism on 85 rods of rebar!

It gets more abstract, with Scott Groeniger mapping different scales of time and creating a kind of slide rule for analog computation, and Rex Vlcek’s "+850=North Korea," which balances interchangeable light and dark forces of censorship.

Elizabeth Nakoa’s "All That’s Left" is a diaphanous quilt of up-cycled tea bags that are stitched together to form the surface on to which an image of her mother — whose worsening Alzheimer’s is nonetheless anchored by a daily ritual of tea drinking — is printed. Kyle Jablonski abstracts the newspaper, the most ubiquitous expression of the print medium, into its basic rhythms of column and image block.

Duncan Dempster relates the number 85 to the late 20th-century decade and delivers a condensed homage to the cassette tape and the audio collage of mixes that many of us have boxed away.

The do-it-yourself hands-on spirit of printmaking played a significant role in the cultural development of the post-punk ’80s. From the covers for limited-edition record pressings to bands’ promotional posters and T-shirts, screen printing and lithography, for example, have had a tremendous impact on our visual culture.

We now live in a superheated media climate that generates more images per second than can be rationally grasped. Much of the aesthetic of collage, jump-cut, layering and juxtaposition was born on silk screens and copper plates. But this show demonstrates something more than dogged dedication to a medium. It is surprising (and wonderful) to see the nonelectronic arts not only keeping pace, but almost casually exceeding the depth of anything that Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook or Vine can deliver.

In the end, the manual printing process is about time invested and time spent. This is not to say that digital production doesn’t have its own labor or compositional strategies, but pushing pixels will never be equivalent to pulling a print.

Contemplation of these works taps into a reserve of power based on appreciating and honoring the physicality behind their creation.

As digital communications channels are cut down to ever shorter bursts of characters and stop-motion imagery, these printmakers put in ever longer hours, operating as a collective no less! Though the work doesn’t necessarily addresses the digital transformation of culture, we are invited to consider a field of simulated Post-it notes, works that almost operate like dioramas, and numerous pieces that represent a meditative links between production and expression.

To step into this gallery is to step out of the torrents of modernity without losing a single drop of the engagement that makes our times so fascinating, challenging and overwhelming.