TERESA COLE
reception june 5 th 6–9 pm
TRANSFER
With their multiple layers of richly allusive, cross-cultural imagery, Teresa Cole’s prints uncover missing links between
pattern and meaning, ornamentation and narrative. They occupy a rare common ground between visual seduction and conceptual engagement, employing innovative techniques and lush iconography to explore the commonalities of human experience. The installation, screen prints, and woodcut relief prints on paper and fabric that make up the artist’s Gallery Bienvenu exhibition draw inspiration from her trips to India to research the origins of pattern.
Within these lavish compositions, the viewer will find motifs adapted from the Adalaj step well near Ahmedabad,
the ornate wall carvings of a mogul palace in Jaipur, and a baroque array of serpentine flourishes, scrolls, and motifs from the animal and vegetal worlds. These elements jostle and flow together in vignettes that evoke the frenetic, eye-opening wonder of traveling to foreign lands. “In art,” Cole observes, “we use pattern, but very often its meaning is lost. It might allude to identity, but it’s rarely clear what a given pattern actually means. In Indian culture, there are narratives that are so well known that they have become pattern.”
A professor of printmaking at Tulane University, Cole has seen her works exhibited and collected in galleries and
museums around the globe. The works are renowned for their virtuosic graphic sophistication, which, upon closer inspection, rewards the viewer with an intense texturality and translucence arising from the layering of inks, cut papers, and fabrics. Some of Cole’s prints resplend with silver leaf on tarlatan fabric, an unusual integration of media blending Indian traditions and Western printmaking techniques. In these works, as across her output, she acts as a transferrer of optical effects and the cultural coding embedded within them. This essentially syntactical enterprise, in Cole’s hands, is never less than visually ravishing, a testament to the crux of her thesis: that mark-making and meaning are one and the same.
Richard Speer
exhibition dates: june 3 - july 22 , 2010 reception: june 5th 6–9 pm rd
nd
Front Cover: Excavation I, unique relief print on paper, 48” x 84”, 2009
Untitled Pattern V, relief print on paper, 39� x 60�, 2010
CC 24/7 Installation (detail 4), screen and relief print on cut paper, 24� x 18�, 2008
CC 24/7 Installation (detail 1), screen and relief print on cut paper, 24� x 18�, 2008
Untitled Pattern III, relief print on paper, 44� x 90�, 2010
CC 24/7 Installation (detail 3) screen and relief print on cut paper, 22� x 24�, 2008
518 JULIA STREET, NEW ORLEANS, LA 70130
Serpentine (detail) relief print on hand dyed tarlatan and paper, 95” x 36” x 6” ARTWORK © TERESA COLE 2010 CATALOG © GALLERY BIENVENU 2010 PHOTOS BY MIKE SMITH
504.525.0518
www.gallerybienvenu.com