Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop is pleased to announce the opening of One Year Later: Part I, the first of two exhibitions featuring our 2011 Studio Immersion Project Fellows. On view is the work of Joseph Burwell, Ethan Greenbaum, Naomi Reis and Beth Sutherland.

For many SIP Fellows, the 3-month fellowship at RBPMW is their first exposure to printmaking. It is a time of experimentation, reflection and new directions. The experience permeates each artist’s practice, allowing them to pursue their independent artistic goals with newly discovered insights from printmaking. Like RBPMW’s studio, this group of artists is diverse in artistic practice and style. This exhibition is a glimpse of the effect of their tenure at RBPMW, One Year Later.

Sutherland and Greenbaum are inspired by everyday people, yet neither represents the figure. Sutherland creates intricately detailed watercolors and etchings of suburban American architecture. Working exclusively from life, she chooses exteriors that reveal a narrative about the inhabitants. Greenbaum zooms in closer, recreating facades of structures that surround us. The depicted striations and cracks provide a narrative about our use of those structures. Greenbaum is exhibiting vacuum formed photographs of New York City pavement – enlarging his close-up images and imbuing them with a sculptural presence. Both Sutherland and Greenbaum focus on finding beauty in the most ordinary.

Burwell and Reis create imaginative pieces that have a sense of familiarity but are not entirely recognizable. Burwell fuses architectural elements from different time periods and cultures to create new ambiguous buildings with a futuristic air. Burwell draws architectural inspiration from Islamic, Medieval and Turkish buildings; his use of isometric perspective is borrowed from Medieval painting, and his color pallete is informed by video games, sports teams’ uniforms and Islamic manuscripts. Like Burwell, Reis employs an anomalous color palette for her subject matter. Working in the classical tradition of botanical painting, she contemporizes her work by presenting an artificial view of nature. Starting with photographs taken at the Brooklyn Botanical gardens, Reis digitally manipulates each image, applying numerous filters to stylize and abstract her subject, as a model for her paintings. The resulting paintings employ flat planes of unnatural colors, rendering nature through a mechanical lens.

Coming up in August: One Year Later: Part II Featuring: Veronica Frenning, Erik Hougen and Elaine Sui-hui