Taking Out and Putting In
- User’s Guide to Direct Visual Action, Atelier Circulaire, Montréal, 2013
- The Beaver Still Needs a Log, Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver, 2013
- Collections: UBC Print Research Centre (Vancouver), JAC Studios (Copenhagen)
Taking Out and its companion Putting In are large-scale prints that utilise a cutting board from the University of Alberta’s printmaking studio as a matrix, the physical surface used to transfer ink to paper. The resulting marks—the accumulated evidence of years of studio labour by countless artists—are overprinted with a digital text: “These are the marks from the cutting board in the studio, but Steve says telling you this takes out all the beauty.” Superimposing this comment from the studio’s technician highlights how Hawrysio grounds her exploration of form and abstraction within the specificities of process and social context.
“Where is the locus of beauty in Hawrysio’s work? Despite her procedural rigour and her ad hoc bravery during the transformative moment when outer experience impinges on the forming artifact, she is still sometimes content to let mystery and wonder float freely, like perfume, through what she makes. As with her recent, exquisite, paired prints, Taking Out and Putting In. Here, an explanatory text in one print presumably ‘takes the beauty out’ of it by ‘revealing the source/process/signifier,’ while the second print ‘puts the beauty in’ by leaving the work’s imagery free of annotation. What is more beautiful? To be schooled, to be privy to the work’s agenda? Or to be condemned—or released—to freedom?”
Gary Michael Dault
