January 5, 2009

Anyone who makes prints or loves them should catch Helen Frederick’s show, “Indefinite States of Emergency,” at Washington Printmakers Gallery. Frederick has been an essential figure in the DC arts community for many years; she deserves a huge dollop of credit for wrestling Pyramid Atlantic into being, building it a foundation in resurgent Silver Spring and guiding it to becoming a premier locus for printmaking and paper arts in our region. Frederick retired as Director of Pyramid last year and has, judging by the show opened Friday, made good use of her newfound time to develop an impressive new body of work.
The work seems to use almost all of the printmaking techniques around that don’t require acid, from solarplate etching to faux lithography transfer to screenprinting and more. They are combined in a way that appears seamless and never forced. As a printmaker myself, I know that part is far from easy. The images that repeat throughout the pieces include a woman in yoga poses touching the floor reverently, poised above scenes of warfare and unspecified danger. To me, they speak of the way we create compartments to protect ourselves and imagine that we can, simply by good intentions, alter reality.
Now for my personal carp: the illustrated pamphlet, sort of a mini-catalog, that accompanies the work, features some prose certainly intended to provide illumination and intellectual context but in my case providing only teeth-gnashing. (Anybody know what “haptic-perceptual” means? Even spell-check rebels.) If this means that I’m a pre-post modernist, I’ll just have to find a way to live with that.