PLEXUS

Rob Swainston

February 4 ­ March 20, 2011

The Esther Massry Gallery at The College of Saint Rose presents “PLEXUS” by New York City artist Rob Swainston, whose work crosses over from printmaking to installation, drawing and video in an exploration of social and historical processes.

Reception: Friday, February 4, 5:00-7:00 p.m. Lecture: Friday, February 4, 7:00 p.m. Saint Joseph Auditorium

Rob Swainston finds printmaking uniquely situated to address the ways in which historical, political, and cultural factors contribute to how we experience and understand images in our society. In its ability to disseminate information quickly and cheaply, the printed image—historically understood to be the most democratic medium—not only threatens the impact of other mediums, but also, according to Swainston, "has the power to subsume all forms of knowledge and discourse."

Swainston’s work crosses over from print and paper media into installation, sculpture, and video. His process involves cutting up, overprinting, repeating, and reassembling prints in multiple ways. He is constantly rebuilding and reassembling his work while adding new components and destroying old. The artist likens this process to the construction of our social world. While his process mirrors that world, the content is also embedded in history and politics. His experience as a master printer has also led him to explore and push the limits of traditional techniques.

The title of the exhibition, “PLEXUS,” describes a dense convergence of networks, an intersection place, and a conduit of multiplicities. While all the parts of a plexus are linked, a plexus does not synthesize, order, or homogenize its components. “PLEXUS” is comprised of five parts: Propositions, Mirrors, Machines, Mountain, and Cascade. While all the parts are linked, each component of the plexus has a different set of attractors at work––attractors that germinate order, pattern, structure, and sense out of what would otherwise appear to be a chaotic mishmash of disassociated and reassembled imagery.

Propositions is inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s "Combines" and Deleuzian architectural theory. The series consists of multiple mixed-media works that merge traditional printmaking processes—such as lithography, woodcut, and silkscreen—with digital photography and printing to create a torrent of visual information and energy, all compressed into uniform 24” x 32” x 1” boxes. Mimicking biological and social processes in which the urgency of recombination is a matter of survival, Swainston’s Propositions investigates the simultaneous desire to rebuild and destroy. Mirrors consists of installations on the gallery ceiling viewed through mirrors on the floor. These elements share both bordering and layering attractors with Propositions.

Machines are simple-to-complex rule-based systems. These Machines—four 10’x15’ woodblock prints—follow two interrelated trajectories based on advances in image representation and the pseudo-historical notion of “Course of Empire” that originated in 19th century American popular history. This social narrative—from nature to mechanization, standardization, spectacle-consummation, and recombination—is performed through woodblock relief printing. Reading left to right, the progression from image machines of wood grain, to linear black and white, to multilayered color separation traces the evolution of relief printing technology but remains decipherable as “a woodblock.” Cascade, three 24-foot-long ceiling-to-floor scrolls, demonstrates that the same information blocks used in Machines can be recoded to fit another narrative.

Mountain, a performance video presented on a small monitor coupled with one drawing, mimics a calm domestic environment. However, the presentation is in tension with the performance, in which the artist attempts to intervene with a hyper-mediated landscape by drawing with rolls of paper on the side of a hill.