Perhaps part of the reason for this is precisely that we encounter so much more art through reproduction than we do in person. Even we professional art viewers turn to copies to refresh our recollections of direct encounters. Prints, being eponyms of the mechanical processes that produce everything from cereal boxes to Andy Warhol’s celebrity portraits, suffer less from this abridging. But I don’t think that explains the sense of immediacy I feel like a jolt of electricity when confronted by a print. Rather, my sense is that prints fulfill my desire for a certain kind of modern experience more immediately and more fully than do other kinds of images.
We don’t look at art the way our ancestors did, and enjoying older works requires learning to see in outmoded ways. That’s part of what I teach in my Art History classes. The elaborate verisimilitude of painting gives us enormous pleasure, but it fails in one crucial way: a fault it shares with our own, biological vision. Among the dazzling visual array available to us sophisticated moderns, it remains on the raw end of the data stream. The things the painter “shows” us are scarcely discernable against the background illusion. A print, by contrast, is a far more modern way of encoding visual information. The painter shows us two things at once, or maybe three: what was there, what it means, and how he feels about it. A printmaker shows us all these things, but may also diagram relationships between the parts, or contrast two- and three-dimensional ways of showing, and all the while make us aware of her intervention without having to degrade the information to do so. Compared to painting, then, which is a medium of the eye, prints are a medium of the mind. It was Marcel Duchamp, who also said the camera was just a mechanical means of making art and neither good or bad in itself, who called for a more cerebral, less “retinal” art for the future. We—and our prints—are that future.
In a sense, then, Stephanie Dykes’ prints may be viewed not only as evidence of things she has seen and contemplated, but as sometimes-explicit, aesthetically-driven diagrams of those things. Technically speaking, Dykes is plugged into the present; her academic credentials are up to date and she is fully engaged with the contemporary print movement through
SaltGrass Printmakers, the cooperative, non-profit facility she co-founded with
Sandy Brunvand. A desire to create the visual future is ambitious, and her ambition is evident at once in both the large scale of the individual prints and the limited palette she uses, which places sense data on a more equal, less privileged footing alongside what she knows about its sources. "Discharging Her Duties," a tour de force of printing almost seven feet long, presents a meticulously rendered panoramic industrial setting on the edge of nature, a familiar synecdoche for life on the dry bed of the Great Salt Sea (and a perfect place to find salt grass). Against this background she arrays a compendium of likely impossibilities: a farmer in a welding mask, a cow with a cell phone, a brace of Carnival clowns hanging from a crane, a man in wading boots gently cradling a miniature freighter whose deckhouse seems to be a sprawling collection of buildings that belong on land.
|1| In the center, intently studying something we don’t see, her back to us, sits an enigmatic female figure, her pocket full of drawing tools. If this is a portrait of the artist at work, she is not the only recognizably familiar figure in view. In the sky, in the corner where our eyes end up if we scan the image while walking from left to right, a heraldic troop of flying angels wrestle a banner we can’t quite read into the picture. If we could read it, we may rest assured it would say
In Hoc Signo Vinces: In This Sign You Shall Conquer.
Such familiar visual tropes, recognizable to some viewers and ironic to others, abound throughout Dykes world, but they are only part of the homely connections she offers. A veritable encyclopedia of representational styles marches along as well. What might be shrubs lining the road to the factory office building turns out, on closer inspection, to be a pair of high-contrast lines of work men, like those on the dole seen waiting in depersonalizing queues in images of the Great Depression. Elsewhere, Renaissance and Victorian decorative patterns, familiar from decorative textiles and luxury goods, form ambiguous fields -- pale background or transparent foreground? -- to scrawled or carved figure studies. The vocabulary of printmaking is explored and exploited everywhere. In "Cyclical Time Too," a pair of crones stands on either side of a central, framed image of an architectural vase.
|2| One’s skin is marked by the texture of chiseled wood; the other’s is shaded by a continuous, looping scribble of line. Elsewhere, similar textures render draperies on classic figure pairs: two angels, two saints–one with a shopping bag looped over an arm, or the great medieval duo: the crowned figure of the Church triumphant juxtaposed against the blindfolded symbol of the Synagogue.
One insight into Dykes’ terrestrial cosmology comes from the frequent use of animals one might see in a city or near a lake. Squirrels pursue acorns that seem to fall not from oak trees but from Renaissance ornaments. Long-legged birds—storks, egrets, feathered cranes—groom women’s hair or wait patiently for us to look away so they can move. Another may lie in her use of the term
Shiviti to identify several prints. In Jewish tradition, a shiviti is a printed plaque placed on a wall in the home, reminding the occupants that “I have set the Lord always before me.” It is not just a framed piece of paper, though: spiritual power binds it to the spot and exacting ritual is necessary to move it. It may be the closest thing a printmaker can have to a tutelary spirit or guardian angel. It is also, in Dykes’ case, a sobering reminder that all this play aspires to serious ends.
One instance of sobriety interwoven with celebration is "4 by 4orty by 4."
|3| At first glance a most grave image, it could come straight from the pages of an alchemical text. Four elaborately decorated, stately goblets stand arrayed as on a shelf above a field of knot work decorations each made of four long-stemmed seedpods. As an example of the encyclopedic universalism of Enlightenment taste it merits not just examination, but long and careful contemplation. One scarcely needs to know that it recalls a night when four women, in common celebration of their fortieth birthdays, shared the intoxicating contents of their individual experiences with love; but knowing that, the generic similarity of the vessels’ utilitarian design and the fanciful, unique way each is turned out take on a ripe significance.
Like any true artist, Dykes is most interested in the work she is doing now. One piece at C.U.A.C. that suggests where she may be going is elaborately entitled "Fibonacci Task With Ernst and Duchamp, to be continued . . .". Made up of several set-pieces that increase in size as they spiral around the sheet on which they are printed, it raises the question of whether the artist means to continue its exploration of the
frottage technique of Ernst and the optical experiments of Duchamp—two seminal contributions to our visual lexicon—or whether it would be enough if the viewer imagined its path out into space for her. Another current project, only hinted at here, involves constructing a Gothic cathedral of the mind in a series of large prints.
|4-5| Wrapping around the room to surround and incorporate the viewer, the work will combine extensive research into the aesthetics, the engineering, the social, economic, and historical aspects of one of humanity’s greatest moments with the observations and, most likely, the biography of the owner of one of the most inquisitive and playful—may one say curious?—minds on the contemporary scene.
