The Page Bond Gallery is pleased to present Spring Prints: a group exhibition featuring remarkable contemporary prints by Polly Apfelbaum, John Baldessari, Will Cotton, Jim Dine, Mark Fox, John Giorno, Samuel Levi Jones, Ryan McGinnes, Jiha Moon, Kelley Reemsten, Fiona Watson, and Jere Williams opening Friday, April 6, 2018 from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition runs through April 28, 2018.
Vibrant color and bold design characterize the woodblock prints of New York-based artist, Polly Apfelbaum. The subject of a 2017 exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, these prints were produced in collaboration with master printers at Durham Press in Apfelbaum’s native Pennsylvania. Apfelbaum is known for process-oriented methods employing fabric, ceramics, and mixed media, and her prints demonstrate a similar approach. She selected the colors and arranged interchangeable woodblocks in an improvisational manner, producing rhythmic patterns in a dazzling range of rainbow hues. Clean-edged shapes contrast with the rough edges of handmade Japanese paper producing a methodical and playful effect.
Apfelbaum’s work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally since the 1980s. In 2003, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia hosted a mid-career survey which traveled and produced a comprehensive catalogue of her work. A recent recipient of the Rome Prize, she has also received several prestigious awards throughout her career including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Pollock-Krasner grant. Her work is included in the collections of the MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, LACMA, and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Based in New York, Mark Fox works in multiple media, including drawing, sculpture, film, video, and theater. He is known for using paper as both surface and sculptural form. Two and three-dimensional works are layered with marks, text, and materials which conceal and reveal strata of meaning. His prints demonstrate similar processes, incorporating curved words made nearly illegible in the processes of mark-making and chine collé. The text’s ability to be seen and communicate is complicated by the interference of overlapping grids, scribbles, and paper.
Fox’s work has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across the United States and Europe. It is also included in numerous public and private collections including the MOMA, Whitney Museum of American Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Anderson Collection at his alma mater, Stanford University. He has also been featured in ARTnews, Art and Antiques, Apollo Magazine, The New York Times, and the Houston Chronicle. Fox has received various fellowships and residencies, notably from the Versailles Foundation in France and the Foundation and Center for Contemporary Art in Prague, Czech Republic as well as several Jim Henson Foundation Project Grants.
Samuel Levi Jones is known for working with deconstructed books, and his prints reference the same imagery and concept. Jones selects and disassembles seemingly objective and authoritative texts like encyclopedias, exposing subjective and exclusionary practices that perpetuate social and racial inequities. With similar grid-like compositions, subtle contrasts of bright and neutral colors, and worn frayed-edge textures, the prints recall his assemblages made from fabric book covers sans their pages of text. In process and presentation, Jones subjectively withholds information from viewers just as these sources exclude certain facts from their compendiums. Luring viewers with formal order, the images prompt questions about the limitations of comprehensive texts and the ways in which knowledge is controlled and framed.
Jones earned an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 2012 and currently lives and works in Chicago. He was awarded the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Joyce Alexander Wein Artist Prize whose past recipients include Glenn Ligon and Lorna Simpson. His work has been featured in numerous exhibitions throughout the United States, including solo exhibitions at the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art and the Studio Museum, and is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Miami’s Rubell Family Collection, and LACMA.
