UB Art Galleries’ exhibitions to showcase print practice

Three exhibitions that expand the traditional view of printmaking will open next month in the UB Art Galleries.

“Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston: History is Present” will open April 6 and run through July 26 in the UB Anderson Gallery. An opening reception will take place from 5-8 p.m. April 6 in the gallery. Also opening that night in the Anderson Gallery is “Looking Up,” a selection of works from the UB Art Galleries’ collection inspired by the eclipse.

Opening in the Center for the Arts Gallery on April 18 are “Yoonmi Nam: Among Other Things” and “Wuon-Gean Ho: The Heart’s Sight.” Both exhibitions run through June 21. An opening reception will take place from 5-8 p.m. April 18 in the First-Floor gallery.

All three of these solo exhibitions demonstrate the incredible variety within printmaking, and how time-intensive processes like carving, etching and making matrices translate beyond paper and fabric to wood and ceramics. These works, predominately produced since 2020, examine — through repetition of form and recalibration of image — the continuing COVID-19 health emergency, alienation and otherness, protests, insurrections and the meaning that can be drawn in community, in solidarity and in contemplative action. 

“Wuon-Gean Ho, Yoonmi Nam, and Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston are all brilliant artists, and they are also educators,” says Anna Wager, curator of exhibitions for the UB Art Galleries. “Their work widely expands what we think of as printmaking. Woodblocks that are huge in scale, lithographs that are hand-sized, Tyvek^® sheets that appear as metal and ceramics that appear as takeout containers: The range here is hard to contain in a few sentences.

“We are thrilled to be working with such a talented cohort,” Wager adds, “and are thrilled for their work to connect with UB students, researchers and the Buffalo-Niagara community.” 

“Yoonmi Nam: Among Other Things”
CFA First-Floor Gallery

Yoonmi Nam’s work is a study in observation and objects. She deconstructs, venerates and contemplates “everyday” vessels from takeout containers to cardboard boxes, constructing still lifes and abstract pieces. Through observation, these objects that we routinely handle, display and discard take on a second life, one that prompts us to consider things that we have been conditioned to ignore.

The pieces are durational, layered over time, suggesting something both fleeting and eternal. As living beings, humans are impermanent. Nam argues that by surrounding ourselves with a collection of things, we are able to feel a sense of permanence through these arrangements. While our cultural artifacts give us comfort, products like Styrofoam, plastic packaging and Amazon boxes, though smartly designed with specific functions, are also structured to be discarded.

This contradiction is central to Nam’s work, and the arrangements of her objects reference Korean history and value, as seen in 19th-century 책거리 (chaekgeori) painting, translated as still lifes of “books and things.”

Though initially focused on books and the promotion of Korea as a learned, bibliophilic society, chaekgeori broadly speaks to value and veneration of objects that society has deemed meaningful. Turning cardboard and Tyvek into abstract sculpture and takeout boxes into celadon-glazed ceramics, Nam deconstructs objects we know well, using them as templates for pressure printing and molds for casting. Her work asks how we might re-think value for objects that are meant to be impermanent. 

“Wuon-Gean Ho: The Heart’s Sight”
CFA Second-Floor Gallery 

Wuon-Gean Ho is compelled by the idea of remembering — or rather, of not forgetting. She has described the moments she depicts as nodal moments, holding and encapsulating specific, visceral and tactile feelings, while also standing in for bigger scenes. We all have these moments, which so often coalesce around the senses, particularly touch: coming into contact, handling in wanted or unwanted ways, or taking a small amount. Or “touched”: feeling moved through gratitude or sympathy, past actions or being a little off-kilter.

The exhibition’s title plays on the idea of the heart’s eye as an object of desire, the heart’s sigh as a lament or a rush of joy, and finally the heart’s sight: what we sense and the deepness of that sensing.

These sensory explorations are embedded in Ho’s diary series, with meticulously carved and inked prints that are small, touchable and intimate. These works morphed during the COVID-19 pandemic to become a method of connection at a point when we were cut off from the outside world. Their reportage aspect brings us into her lived experience and encompass strands of life as varied as grief, solo navigation, dance, movement, feeling like an outsider, feeling like an insider, sleep, the importance of animals, swimming, comfort eating, comfort in general and being in nature.

Ho’s work in this exhibition includes linocuts, screenprints, artist books and video. 

“Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston: History is Present”
UB Anderson Gallery  

In “History is Present,” Zorawar Sidhu and Rob Swainston’s large-scale woodcut prints layer art historical references with contemporary catastrophes: America’s political climate, the continuing aftermath of the pandemic, environmental devastation and erosion of bodily autonomy. They document horrors that we’ve become immune to, and prompt us to reckon with them.

New large-format works join their series ”Doomscrolling,” 18 moments collected between May 24, 2020, and Jan. 6, 2021, carved and printed from plywood that had been used to board up New York City. The phenomena of “doomscrolling,” a term that has gained popularity since 2020, is the process of taking in massive amounts of negative information while scrolling on your devices, particularly phones. This informational overwhelm can cause panic at the piling on of images and injustices, which can then cause passivity and numbness.

“Scrolling” is a non-active process. But printmaking is inherently active, and prints have a long history of use in protest, activism and anti-authoritarian dissent. By rendering recent history at a large scale, in layers that draw in references from printmakers such as Albrecht Dürer and Käthe Kollwitz, Sidhu and Swainston draw our attention back to images that we may have forgotten in the scroll.

The overlaying of details from images compress our scrolling into one composite object, giving it the time, space and emotional depth that it deserves.