Are We There Yet?
Exchange Portfolio at Virginia Commonwealth University

Artists: Nadine Bariteau, Kim Beck, Gretchen Bennett, Randy Bolton, Nick Conbere, Amze Emmons, Barbara Foster, Nancy Jo Haselbacher, David Jones, Scott Kolbo, Heidi Neilson, Kristin Ramirez, Arturo Rodriguez, Erik Waterkotte, Barbara Ziegler

 
 

Portfolio Statement

The proliferation of highways, strip-malls, mega-malls, parking lots, corporate office parks, hotels, conference centers, airports, and the like, have created what are know as ‘non-places’: spaces in which people seem almost incidental. The homogenized conurbation that often shapes our daily experience constitutes a large majority of the built environment and profoundly affects how we interact with the world around us. Often banal, generic and inhuman, these spaces are designed for mobility and consumption where public space and human communication are diminished or made irrelevant. They are spaces controlled by technology, economic potential, demographics, geography, and security concerns. Their ubiquity and sameness create repetitive dislocating environments unable to produce sites that might be seen as places of meaningful human agency and interaction. Prints and printmaking, although repetitive and multiple, are instigated by autonomous action and often involve collaborative interaction. Printmaking flirts with the potential for mass production and can attempt to maneuver against privatized and controlled space. The prints included in this portfolio can be a response to these non-places that seem to fill a greater and greater part of our lives. They may function as proposals for larger or site specific works or be designed for further dissemination as photocopies, stencils, etc. They may explore the effects on psyche, community and the environment or address our complicity with, reaction against or how we embrace, these non-places. The portfolio Are we there yet? will be an opportunity for individual voices to take command of the built environment through prints and multiples. The participants who have been selected for this portfolio, all address the built environment in their work, which often includes prints and multiples or is based primarily in printmaking. The range of ideas and approaches the participants take in their own work mirrors the diversity of the built environment and the complexity of our relationship to it.