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Hello All -

This is my first foray into writing for our blog. It is actually tied in to my first art related foray since having Jericho. The boy wonder will be eight weeks old in a few days - crazy to think.

Okay back to the topic at hand...the IPCNY Summer Exhibit. I must be honest and upfront from the beginning - I went to see the show because I had a piece in it and because I had relatives in town and I thought visiting a gallery might be a fun NYC thing to do. I have to say, I was delightfully surprised by the high quality of work on display at the IPCNY. For those that don't know, the IPCNY is the International Print Center of New York. It is located in Chelsea in one of the buildings that has a million galleries in it. The IPCNY usually does an open call for new prints four times a year - it is a free call - open to all printmakers and printshops. The quality of the work on display there is consistently high.

This brings me back to the exhibit - I should have known it was going to be good because the gallery always shows interesting prints. I really responded to the way the exhibit was curated - it was loosely based on social themes/political concerns. When you walked in, you were immediately confronted with themes of death and contemporary demise. I loved Michael Kruger's piece that featured Evil Kneivel on a motorcycle going off a jump. It was printed on acid tabs. Please forgive my lack of titles - I forgot to bring home the title sheet - instead bringing home the juror's statement. Yes, I am a dork. Oh, and I need to give Micheal a shout out for having his print featured on the postcard for the exhibit - it was a different piece, but a cool one as well.

Another piece that I adored was Jeff Wetzig's diptych prints commenting on birth and death. They featured a Xerox Machine/fax machine and a shredder. Very humorous - I think the Bush administration took these two prints to heart.

Actually humor was a big part of the show. For a theme exhibit that dealt with some pretty dark topics, there was a lot of humor on display. Eileen Foti's piece made me laugh out loud. It featured a gouache painting of Dick Cheney in all his gun toting glory. The image was atop of a litho printed McDonald's french fry box. The box was assembled into it's true form. The whole piece was framed in a gulded shadow box with beautiful red fabric encapsulating the carton.

I also enjoyed the humor in Randy Bolton's piece commenting on global warming. Also a diptych - he had a silkscreen of two snowmen, a four color separation silkscreen - showing one snowman intact and the other just a puddle on the ground. I apologize because my description does not do the piece justice. The strength of the piece comes from the cartoonish drawing - stylized like a New Yorker cover (not like the Obama cover controversy). It is through the simplistic style that creates the oomph.

There were a bunch of other pieces that left an impact on me - Desiree Alvarez's delicate funerary scarfs with machine guns printed on the surface, Jonathan Thomas's etching of a house under siege by flooding waters, and Glen Ligon's neon inspired etching that reads "Negro Sunshine" - I also love Ligon's "Me We" neon piece at the Studio Museum in Harlem, but that's another topic.

I must sign off from Brooklyn for now - Jericho is awake and in need of attention.

Traci