Look/Listen

Last Friday, we stopped by Good Citizen Gallery to talk to artist and professor Ken Wood, whose layered, complex prints make up half of the gallery's current exhibit, Expansions and Stratifications. Wood's studio is in City Museum, but he produced the work for this show at Amanda Verbeck's Pele Prints."She's got the former Wildwood Presses now," Wood notes (those are large-scale printing presses developed at Washington University that pretty much make any serious printmaker drool...follow the link to see what they can do).

Though the work is abstract, the title of the show is very much a literal explaination of process. Wood's "stratifications" layer gravelly black-and-white collagraphs under bright blocks of color, some translucent, some saturated. The "expansions," are Brooklyn artist Karl Jensen's intricate cascades of hand-cut white paper, which continue to stretch out under their own weight. Wood and Jensen met at architecture school, and both went to art school. Both artists have a mastery of tools and materials (that's architecture school for you!) as well as a love of shape, form, and in Wood's case, color. Jensen still practices architecture (though Wood tells us he makes large-scale "expansions" for stage sets, and is currently working on some kind of amazing uber-snowflake cutout for Sufjan Steven's 2011 Christmas CD), while Wood has devoted himself to making and teaching visual art.

Wood and Good Citizen proprietor, Andrew James, gave us a detailed walk-through of the show, which comes down October 1. It is well worth skipping out over a lunch hour to catch it before it closes. Here is the guided half-tour, with narration by the artist himself, to give you some backstory on how the work was made, and how the show came together.

"When I was doing this work, I started with the ideas of the gestures. I printed a whole bunch of black-and-white [images] first. And then I worked on the designs for the second phase, switched things around, used different colors….but the idea was there already: two layers, monochrome versus color, gesture versus geometric, dark versus light. But it took a lot of tweaking to get it to work."

Strata #3

"This print in the corner I made last summer. That was the genesis of the rest of the work. When I was doing that, I was thinking about the technique, which is a color layer and then a black and white layer. It’s part gesture and part structure coming through. I thought that I would take those two elements and really separate them."

Strata #9

"The first thing we do is print the collagraph layer. So it’s black and white printing, made from collapgraph plates. Colla means glue, so basically you glue a bunch of crud down on the plate, and you let it dry, and then it then behaves like an etching plate, meaning you smear ink on it, and you rub all the ink off; wherever there’s glue, there’s texture. And wherever there’s texture, the ink will stay. In printmaking, it’s called plate-tone.

When asked what the 'crud' is: "It’s actually called carborundum, it’s a metal grit, and it’s classified with the same numbers as sandpaper. Like 220, 180, 60…the higher the number, the more fine, the lower the number, the more coarse. So, usually I am trying to do something really coarse and then something more refined. The calligraph plates you can only use so many times before they start to degrade. So when you print, you actually leave the ink on, and that helps it, and so it in some ways the process destroys it and in other ways it prolongs it."

Strata #8

"This, on the plate, one layer was put down, and then it dried; and then the second layer got put down, and then it dried. So even on the black layer, there’s multiple layers. The subsequent layers, where there’s color, those are all relief prints, and that just means—so, for instance, in this one, if you want a yellow rectangle, so you cut the yellow rectangle out of Bristol board. You roll it up with ink, and place it on the press, lay this piece of paper over it, and then just roll it through. Whatever shape you see, that’s the shape of a plate, and that’s relief printing."

Strata #12

"And you see in this one there is no callograph layer, there is just the subsequent layers, so you don’t get the same thing..."

Strata #21

"We started with the loose idea of, what if they are cuts that are only horizontal and vertical? Or in my case, forms that are horizontal and vertical. The front pieces are grid-y, and the back pieces are gritty. How can you use straight lines, and yet still give it a dynamic quality? Trying to put limitations on yourself and see how far you can push it, and see what you can invent."

Strata #6

"I’d say that these marks that are part of the collagraph layer, they are the same kinds of marks that I was doing in paintings. They are supposed to represent nature in some form; in some cases, the contours might refer to body contours...That started when I started making these tools and extensions to play with mark. So I would have a single brush, and then I would tape two other brushes next to it, and then I would tape a yardstick onto it, so I could take a big canvas and move it around, to give more of a sense of the body being part of the mark-making, as opposed to, like when you write, you’re just moving your fingers. But this way, you can expand and use your whole body. The idea of tools to make marks makes its way into here, this was done, this mark was made with three brushes that were taped together onto a yardstick.

"I think about the curvilinear as being human, and imperfection, and gesture, and more about the art side of things. The rectilinear is more man-made, trying to be perfect and stable and permanent, and more the architectural side. Then of course, the fact they sometimes trade roles, and the background seems more staid and controlled and the foreground seems more dynamic, is kind of like debunking that. Because of course nothing is ever permanent, and then front, the colors are always printed last. The black and white is always behind it, so it’s always in layers. If the color printed there is supposed to bring structure, why is it sometimes so wispy and thin and transclucent? It’s about this idea of layers."

And of course, the expansions complement "this idea of layers"

They’re called 'Expansions' because they expand as they hang."

"The two on the right [Expansion No. 1, "For Minoru," and Expansion No. 3, "Ken's Buddy") are just a single sheet of paper. One on the left [Expansion No. 5, "Darth's Droop] is two sheets."

Detail, "Darth's Droop."

"He [Jensen] has done concrete sculpture, and he’s done laser-cut steel where it’s bent and folded, and then he started doing maquettes for the steel pieces. He’d cut them out of paper to see how it work, and then he would have them laser-cut. The paper maquettes themselves became their own sculptures, and he became more interested in this regular rhythm that happened over and over again."

Good Citizen Gallery is located at 2247 Gravois (314-348-4587, goodcitizenstl.com), and is open on Friday and Saturday noon to 5 p.m or by appointment. The gallery's next exhibit, Commonwealth, features work by Derek Larson and opens on October 7 with a reception from 6 to 10 p.m. You can already see Larson’s billboard, which went up over the weekend; keep an eye peeled for it the next time you’re cruising down Gravois.