Journey Through Monotype Prints Exhibit
March 28, 2023 @ 12:00 pm – 5:00 pm
ArtSpace Vincennes will open the gallery season with Journey Through Monotype Prints: Amanda Barrow and Elizabeth Busey. The exhibit will open from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on March 3, then Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 5 p.m. through April 23.
Amanda Barrow
Barrow was raised in the Midwest by a social worker and an Episcopalian priest, in an environment conducive to creativity and abstract thinking. In 1992, a Fulbright research grant provided an opportunity for her to live and work in India for 13 months. She has returned to India many times since then, funded by fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Boston Cultural Council, and a host of other institutions. At present, Speedball Art is a proud sponsor of Barrow; she lives/works in Massachusetts and Maine. Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Boston and New York Public Libraries, and the Museum of the Book in the Netherlands, among numerous other places around the world.
Travels in India, China, Europe, New Zealand, Iceland, and the U.S.A. have enhanced Amanda Barrow’s personal vision, leading her to dig deeper into the indigenous spiritual ambiance of the East in her artwork. Synthesizing these Eastern concepts with the Western visual language of her upbringing is her intention. Barrow experiments with transparency and explores the inherent structure of her chosen mediums, including monotype printmaking and painting. The resulting work presents a broad range of abstractions which utilize nature, architecture, and the human body as Amanda Barrow’s primary sources of inspiration.
Elizabeth Busey
“From a distance, Busey’s mono-prints, linotypes and collages can look like quilts or mosaics. Colorful elements are carefully cut and placed into matrices reminiscent of mathematical or scientific principles. When considered up-close, vintage maps, personal cyanotypes and colorful monotypes keep the viewer’s eye moving from element to element. Drawing from travel, topography, and plant forms, her mono-print collages evoke feelings of memory, longing, and connection.
While Busey has lived on both coasts of the United States and has travelled widely throughout North America, Europe, and Australia, she has spent the last twenty-seven years living in the college town of Bloomington, Indiana. Forest trails are minutes from her house, and wilderness areas are but a short drive away. The land is enveloped by trees, so getting a sense of larger terrain is difficult. Instead, she experiences nature on a smaller scale – “examining the erosion of stream beds, the patterning on wild hydrangea leaves or the nexus of forest fungi threads.”
Busey writes: “The use of a structured matrix for my collages is intentional. The different collage elements – maps, free-formed mono-prints, silkscreen ‘topo-‘ marks or plant cyanotypes – echo each other. Over various scales, the mathematical and scientific patterning repeat and repeat – hinting at an unseen and possibly unknowable organizational structure to all of creation.”