There are currently a number of artists who are combining different processes and materials to take a traditional form or medium-such as painting or printmaking-to a new place.
One of the areas where this push has been productive is printmaking. Among the artists whose work is worth highlighting, I would include Sarah Amos, Didier William, and Tammy Nguyen. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that all three of them have spent considerable time outside the United States and have also immersed themselves in other traditions of art making and craftsmanship.
The breadth of Amos’ work is impressive. Yet what makes her work more than a combination of different processes and materials is the animating power of the artist’s imagination.
One of the processes Amos uses to mark the felt is collagraph, a form of printmaking that can be done without a press. In collagraph, the artist attaches various materials to a rigid substrate, which is then inked and printed. Another process is hand sewing, which is essentially drawing with thread. Its stitches are basic-dots and dashes-but the patterns and lines are rich and varied. Together, collagraphy and stitching function as Amos’s way of drawing, with each process embodying a different sense of the passage of time.
Amos’s work may be laborious, but it conveys neither labor nor time, but meditative joy. In this, you can sense her rejection of the art world’s connection to capitalism and its use of outsourcing, endlessly repetitive means of production, and exploitation of others to realize its “ideas.” Again, I would like to emphasize that what takes the artist’s work to another level is her bizarre ingenuity with her materials and painstaking processes. The ordinariness of her stitches becomes extraordinary in their configurations.
As I sat in my chair, mesmerized by the six identically sized black felt works that occupied one wall of the gallery in two rows of three, I had to remind myself that there were other works in the exhibition that I needed to see. In all these works, associations are evoked, but nothing is fixed. These can be clothing patterns or instructions on how to build a spacesuit; stitches resemble chainmail; scarification; hatching, weaving, and grids. They combine into patterns and shapes reminiscent of fantastical creatures, Japanese drawings, African masks, and much more.
Amos further complicates our reading of the three forms by stitching white lines and geometric shapes between them. Is this a diagram of an ancient, unknown civilization that perhaps inhabits another galaxy? Her ability to control the density of the image, from tactile stitches to ghostly collagraphic form, creates a multi-layered, atmospheric space that approaches painting. Formally, I believe this is the outstanding achievement of these works. The forms are neither flat nor defined by seams alone.