Ithacas Ink Shop trades prints with Limerick Studio in Ireland to celebrate their shared birth year – ithaca.com

ITHACA, NY -- Founded in 1999 as a cooperative studio and gallery, the Ink Shop Printmaking Center is unique amongst Ithacas independent art spaces. While other galleries rely on a membership or stable of artists to fill out their exhibition calendars, the Shop taking advantage of the multiplicity and portability of the print medium highlights national and international printmakers and places them in conversation with those from Ithaca and Central New York.

Currently open to the public by appointment only, the Shop has been weathering the present health crisis by buckling down on its core identity as a working studio and planning for the future.

Open since last summer and extended through later this month (March 26), a pair of ongoing exhibits celebrate the Ink Shops commitment to its membership as well as its longstanding tradition of overseas commerce. Both Ink Shop Printmakers 20/20 Hindsight Portfolio and Limerick Studio Printmakers: 20 Years of Change represent the fruits of a portfolio exchange, made last year, between the Shop and an independent Irish print shop.

Most of the artists in the Ink Shop portfolio will be familiar in name and approach to longtime followers of local art. The diversity and technical sophistication of the Shops membership is as clear as ever, but the selections feel oddly both encapsulated and scattered. It isnt a show that stands on its own at least not any more.

Judy Barringers dark blue etching Beyond the Krmn Line the title refers to the boundary between the Earths atmosphere and outer space is characteristically rich and complex. Like an extract from a graphic novel, the piece unfolds across two panels: a cryptic explosion and placid asteroids, painterly effects played off of crisp outlines and cross-hatching.

Kumi Korfs color intaglio Chrysalis Baby displays a similar nuanced layering, embedding memories of nature in simplified abstract forms. Hunter Buck and Christa Wolf, also working in intaglio, explore varieties of gestural abstraction. Ian McCoys Past, Present, Potential, a black-and-white woodcut on an unfolded manila folder, unravels a configuration of geometric facets into a visionary landscape. Jenny Pope and Scout Dunbar both forego their customary exuberant color for near black-and-white. Popes woodcut Irish Elk and Great Auk and Dunbars transfer drawing Circus Pony the latter accented in colored pencil are characteristically irrepressible.

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The Limerick Printmakers portfolio, in contrast, ought to represent new vistas. That much of it feels over-familiar testifies to the homogeneity of much contemporary art worldwide. Much of the work displays a youth-oriented or pop aesthetic, perhaps more at home in T-shirt or poster design than in a formal gallery space. (Unlike the Ink Shop work, the Irish pieces here are unframed.)

Several artists do this quite well: with a welcome measure of elegance and wit. Carol Kennedys mixed media cyanotype An Alien in Lough Derg combines the familiar deep blue with a spattering of gold the decorative effect offsetting the intricate threads of a submerged jellyfish. Eva Byrnes silkscreen Are there clouds in the night-time? and ine Finnegans monoprint and collagraph CHANGE SLOW display a seemingly Japanese-inspired kawaii sensibility. Clodagh Twomeys Cornucopia, another silkscreen print, recalls a mid-twentieth-century pop futurism.

Still, some of us long for an art of greater imaginative and expressive depth one attempted by only a few of the Limerick artists here.

David Lilburns What will I think tomorrow? is the most compelling of these by a good measure. Combining drypoint in dark brown with patches of faint blue watercolor and playful additions a U.S. flag stamp among them in chine-coll, Lilburn creates an evocative picture map of his city. The scene is full: little architectural vignettes, caricatures of people and animals, symbols of terrain and travel.

Given the etiolated condition of the local exhibitions scene and the continuing struggles of the artists and organizations that work to make it happen, these two modest shows can best be taken as a kind of institutional memory. Planned in advance of the current pandemic, they testify to longstanding ways of doing things that perhaps need to be reconstructed if not radically rethought. Too, they offer a welcome reminder of exactly what weve been missing.

For those unable to visit the gallery in person, a virtual presentation of these shows can be found at https://ink-shop.org/exhibits/.

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Ithacas Ink Shop trades prints with Limerick Studio in Ireland to celebrate their shared birth year - ithaca.com