Neverending story
Jordan Schwab and Patrick Bulas attended a residency at Island Mountain Arts in Well, BC with the intention of finding a way to continue their collaborative work now that Jordan has moved to Quesnel, BC and Patrick continues to reside in Saskatoon.
The resulting new work is a continuous, ever-changing tapestry of 4’ x 8’ panels set between transferred images of Jordan and Patrick lifting a 2 x 4 wooden board found walking through Wells. Over time, more panels will be added, continuing the ongoing story of their experiences and friendship in both linear and non-linear ways. Newer panels move the story forward chronologically but also affect how previous panels are read and understood, giving the artists the freedom to go back and rework panels as they choose.
Support materials in the form of prints, drawing, sculpture, video, audio, etc. are intended to be exhibited alongside with the tapestry, further clarifying the story that the tapestry is trying to tell.
The pile of linocut bears and the hand drawn golden moon of the first panel of the tapestry were created while the artist stayed in Wells, a gold mining town in the interior of British Columbia.
The Cat That Slept on a Tortoise Shell
To be honest, this series of prints began as something done for fun, a break from my more “serious” work. I’ve done this before, working on a small animal print or two in between projects as a way to keep working in the studio while being able to step back from what I’ve been dedicating my time and efforts on. A few years ago, I decided to try a small print of my cat Lucy sleeping on top of a tortoise, with the idea that cats can sleep anywhere they want to, even on top of a slow moving reptile. After the print was finished, I decided that Lucy wouldn’t mind sleeping on the snout of a crocodile or curling up around the horn of a rhinoceros and over time Lucy didn’t just sleep but mimicked other animals and interacted with them.
Lucy has been my cat for over a decade now and has become an important part of my life. As many pet owners can attest to, our pets become part of our families. We feed them, shelter them, talk to them, play with them, and a growing number of us post an obscene number of photos and videos of them online. We frequently identity ourselves with our pets and in this work Lucy represents me in a way. A number of the prints in this series reflects what’s going on in my life at the time, played out in the imagined encounters between Lucy and the other animals.
Animals often populate folktales, fables, and myths, their anthropomorphic behaviour entertaining and educating us for generations. While none of the prints here are held to any specific tale, they suggest stories that are left up to us to invent and provide us with those valuable life lessons that only a cat can give us.
The pictures that accompanied the stories that I grew up with as a child added another dimension to the words of the author. I work in the medium of mezzotint for its strong connection to drawing and in particular to illustration in the case of the work in this exhibition. It ‘s a traditional printmaking technique that involves roughening the surface of a copper plate with a tool called a rocker. When the plate is inked and printed, the textured surface holds ink and produces a rich black. Hand tools are used to work back into the plate to bring out subtle values and highlights to create an image. Mezzotint allows for highly refined images and give these prints a weight that wouldn’t be there if they were done more loosely. The attention to detail gives the work a sense of reality and creates an ideal world where Lucy can coexist with all these animals in a way that would otherwise be impossible or least extremely difficult.
So what was a pause from more involved work became something more serious and developed into what you see here. Don’t worry, I’m still having fun. There’s a certain joy in seeing Lucy hanging upside down with her bat family or staring down a grizzly bear, and I can only imagine the conversation that she’s having with a pair of barn owls.
Making a Good First Impression
Making a Good First Impression is an exhibition about printmaking, simplified. Printmaking as a medium changed the way the world is seen. With the advent of the printing press and the refinement of various techniques, books and printed images became available to a broader public. Printmaking started as something immediate–a cheap way to share information–but has now become a set of complicated processes. As an art form, it can still create beautiful imagery, but it so technically oriented, one needs to be an aficionado to be truly appreciate the craft.
Patrick Bulas, a master printmaker, technician, and instructor is well versed in the traditions associated with the practice. Jordan Schwab, an artist and instructor who works in a variety of mediums including installation, video, and drawing has developed a practice that explores ideas of efficiency and change, and how these forces affect our constructed environment. The two, working collaboratively, have set out to challenge a traditional medium to become relevant again. If printmaking has become synonymous with process, then, the process should be shown. With this project, the print, as it was when printmaking was first conceptualized, becomes secondary to the information.
Using historical printmaking references, pop culture and a little bit of insanity, Patrick and Jordan look to push the boundaries of what is considered a print. Taking printing plates that have been created through traditional techniques like woodcut and etching and using unorthodox printing methods such as gunpowder and ramming a truck into a wall to replace the use of a press, the artists change how a print is made, and learn something new about the medium.
Food Truck
Jordan Schwab & Patrick Bulas
Jordan Schwab is an artist and educator with an interest in community-based work and multimedia installation. Patrick Bulas brings his focus on printmaking into his work as an artist and educator. Together, the Saskatoon based artists have collaborated on work that challenges the conventions of printmaking, making it more accessible to a wider audience while still retaining what makes it such a long-lasting, dynamic artform.
Food Truck is their take on the explosive popularity of foodie culture. Participants are invited to be part of the collaboration by becoming customers, ordering from the menu and hand printing their linocut food choice onto a paper plate through the pressure of a high five between themselves and the artists. Tips are always appreciated.
Fields of Light & Our Particles are in Motion
The phenomena studied in the fields of physics and astronomy continues to be a strong influence in my work. Images found in scientific journals and books as well as those found on the Internet still hold my interest, but recently I have begun to take a closer look at the world around me in the context of the principles and theories developed by physicists.
These principles and theories do not just apply to interstellar forces that seem so far removed from our everyday lives nor do they just describe the subatomic world unseen by the unaided eye. The laws and theories of physics are fundamental and physicists strive to develop theories and ideas that can explain everything from minute subatomic particles being smashed apart in a lab to the computer screen (or piece of paper) you are reading right now to a distance star light years away. I like the idea that I can have a print based on images of something like solar flares beside a print that is based on something I can directly observe such as the surface of the river as I walk across the University Bridge on the way to work. Of course I could take this idea of fundamental laws and theories too far and use any image I wanted without any sort of consideration, but this is where my role as an artist steps in.
Light continues to be important in my work. I continue to work largely through a reductive process, meaning I print the lightest color first, work back into the plate, print the next color and repeat the process until I reach the final image. It is interesting to see the light of each image develop as I rework the plate.
The images I develop are abstracted to some extent. I don’t want the viewer to get caught up in pinning down exactly what the image is. Instead, the images, regardless of where they come from, are intended to be observations of light and energy.
The Roots of the Dyson Tree
This series of color reductive woodcuts is based on the writing of the English American theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson and the seemingly unrelated activity of transplanting plants from a friend’s yard to my own.
One of Dyson’s speculative theories of space colonization involves planting a genetically modified seed on a comet and growing a giant hollow tree that would provide shelter, water, and a breathable atmosphere for human colonists as the comet travels through space.
The idea of the Dyson tree was in the back of my mind as I dug around the roots of several plants to get them ready to transplant them to my backyard. Lifting the plants out of the ground and “floating” them to the back of my friend’s truck, was reminiscence of the weightlessness of space and I imagined the freed plants slowly drifting through space.