Grafton Regional Gallery, NSW ( 23 October - 5 December 2021)
The Stopping Time exhibition occupies all galleries in the fabulous new Grafton Regional Gallery extension. The huge variety of scale, material and objects in this exhibition are accommodated superbly in the new extension with its range of vast to intimate spaces.
Installation shots are below or take a Virtual tour via video:
Gallery One. Installation view, Stopping Time 2021
photography by Simon Hughes
Material prints are images or objects that have been created from a matrix by mechanical, chemical or electronic means and can be experienced as physical or material artefacts. The strategic inclusiveness of this broad definition positions traditional prints on paper as part of a much larger constellation of printed images that extends well beyond the usual point of origin for printmaking in the fifteenth century, when Gutenberg invented movable type. It also extends into the present, beyond the perceived terminating decline with the development of digital photography at the end of the twentieth century. Not unexpectedly, works on paper make up the vast bulk of material in the exhibition since, as with any touring exhibition, logistical limitations amplify when the works in the exhibition reach across media divisions and into deep time. These difficulties partly explain the regretful omission of photography as a major presence in the exhibition. Nonetheless, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with its infinite resources, has already mounted a massive survey of photography titled The Printed Picture, curated by Richard Benson, which presented a seamless lineage from fifteenth-century woodcuts to printed barcodes with a focus on material prints and an examination of the processes by which they were printed. Incidentally, this 2008 exhibition also demonstrated that the differences between chemical and digital processes in photography are essentially semantic distinctions.
It is not only the expanded definition of printmaking that differentiates Stopping Time: Material Prints from 3000 BCE to Now from any other print exhibition yet mounted in Australia. The exhibition adopts a heterochronic view of time by bringing works together in thematic clusters, regardless of the period or place of production, collapsing temporal distance between them, and emphasizing the dual power of material prints to embed or carry past time, and to also stop time during our aesthetic engagement with them. This timeless encounter with material prints might be described as aesthetic time (see, Keith Moxey Visual Time: The Image in History) yet when artists attempt the synthetic transfer of ideas into matter and image it is more a process of collective cultural imagining and technological revelation rather than aestheticism. This can be framed as anachronic time in the sense of no time (timeless) in that the material image carries its own time as I argue in the catalogue. The full range of printmaking practices is represented, from ancient Mesopotamian images pressed in clay from cylinder seals to 3-D printed contemporary works. It includes works from the Griffith University Art Museum, the Newcastle Art Gallery along with several private collections, and the addition of recent work by contemporary artists including: Ali Bezer Blair Coffey Tim Mosely Ryan Presley and Pamela See.
Stopping Time: Material Prints 3000 BCE to Now is curated by Ross Woodrow with assistance from Ali Bezer and Blair Coffey. However it should be acknowledged that all the artists involved in the exhibition and the writing of the catalogue have made significant input into the project, as the staff in the exhibiting galleries at Gympie, Newcastle, Logan and Grafton have made important contributions to the shape of the exhibition.
A comprehensive catalogue was supported by the Gordon Darling Foundation and available at the Grafton Regional Gallery
[A PDF version can be viewed or downloaded on Research Gate ]
At the bottom of this page, an ABECEDARIUM has links to content or themes for every letter of the alphabet to give a rich overview of images and objects in the exhibition. Pick a letter at random or start with "A" and click next to navigate the full alphabet.
Visitors to the exhibition are asked which one of these seemingly identical three works is an original woodcut by Albrecht Dürer The Entombment, c 1510, from the Italian edition of his Small Passions, 1612.
Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528) The Entombment (The Small Passions), 1612 original woodcut. Image: 12.7 cm x 9.7 cm.
The answer is the center work (or Number 2) which is from the Italian edition of 1612, with Latin text on verso. Despite the fact that it is a poor strike, where the ink has dried on the right side of the woodblock creating a light impression on the left side, it is an authentic Durer. If this print was viewed outside of the frame the fact that the back of the sheet contains the typeset printing would be obvious. Johann Mommard copies (Number 1) are not backed, as with the 1889 lithographic facsimile (Number 3) which is on light laid paper with discernible horizontal linear mesh marks.
Treasure hunting - find these wonderful things you may have never seen before.
A cylinder seal made 4000 years ago, and it still prints a clear image with strange cuneiform text.
A lithophane which was the nearest image to an iPad screen in the nineteenth century.
A daguerreotype (duh-geh-ruh-type) which was the first form of photography invented nearly two-hundred years ago. Only one picture could be taken as it was printed on silver. The shiny reflection of the silver makes it hard to see in bright light (just like a phone screen).
The ambrotype, which is next to the daguerreotype in the display case, is another early type of photography, but it is much easier to see the detail, as it uses a different process printing on glass to avoid the mirror reflection of the silver. Look carefully at the back of the ambrotype, as it appears to be in a “plastic case”. This is actually a natural plastic related to rubber, called gutta percha that was extracted from the gum of a Southeast Asian tree, palaquium gutta. It was used to insulate the many undersea telegraph cables, decorate furniture and household items and many other purposes with the belief that there was an endless supply of the latex sap from the forests of Asia. Millions of trees were destroyed before supply collapsed in an ecological disaster one hundred years before the renewed destruction of tropical rain forests today. A websearch for what gutta percha is used for today will surprise you.
