Briar Craig: Words on Paper (and other things)

Briar Craig: Words on Paper (and other things)

vernon public art gallery vernon, british columbia canada www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

Briar Craig | Words on Paper (and other things)

briar craig Words on Paper (and other things)

Vernon Public Art Gallery January 4 - March 1, 2018

Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3 www.vernonpublicartgallery.com 250.545.3173

Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Vernon Public Art Gallery 3228 - 31st Avenue, Vernon, British Columbia, V1T 2H3, Canada January 4 - March 11, 2018 Production: Vernon Public Art Gallery Editor: Lubos Culen Layout and graphic design: Vernon Public Art Gallery Copy editing: Kelsie Balehowsky Cover image: THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO, 2017, 48 x 120 in Photography: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections and Briar Craig Printing: Get Colour Copies, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada ISBN 978-1-927407-41-7 Copyright © 2018, Vernon Public Art Gallery All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the Vernon Public Art Gallery. Requests for permission to use these images should be addressed in writing to the Vernon Public Art Gallery, 3228 31st Avenue, Vernon BC, V1T 2H3, Canada.

Telephone: 250.545.3173 Facsimile: 250.545.9096 Website: www.vernonpublicartgallery.com The Vernon Public Art Gallery is a registered not-for-profit society. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Greater Vernon Advisory Committee/RDNO, the Province of BC’s Gaming Policy and Enforcement Branch, British Columbia Arts Council, the Government of Canada, corporate donors, sponsors, general donations and memberships. Charitable Organization # 108113358RR.

This exhibition is sponsored in part by:

table of CONTENTS

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Executive Director’s Foreword · Dauna Kennedy

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Introduction · Lubos Culen

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Said the Joker to the Thief · Carolyn MacHardy

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Briar Craig in Conversation With Lubos Culen

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Images of Works in the Exhibition

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Artist Biography

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Executive Director’s Foreword

It is with great pleasure that I write this foreword for the catalogue of Briar Craig’s current exhibition, Words on Paper (and other things). With a mixture of humor and seriousness, Craig plays with words through a combination of prints and neon signs. Accompanying his work is a participatory metallic board with words printed on magnetic sheets for visitors to create their own messaging within the exhibition. Briar Craig is the Visual Arts Coordinator and Professor of printmaking, photography and drawing for the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies with The University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus.

Accompanying the photographs documenting Craig’s exhibition in this publication is a critical essay by Carolyn MacHardy, Professor of Art History for the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, UBC Okanagan.

Thank you to both Briar and Carolyn for their contributions to this publication as well as our Curator Lubos Culen who contributes not only to the content contained in the catalogue, but the whole design and layout.

I’d also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Province of British Columbia, the Regional District of the North Okanagan and the British Columbia Arts Council for their ongoing funding of our operations and programming which makes publications such as this possible.

Sincerely, Dauna Kennedy Executive Director The Vernon Public Art Gallery

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introduction - Briar Craig: Words on Paper (and other things)

Briar Craig uses printmaking as the favored medium of his artistic practice and his exhibition at the Vernon Public Art Gallery consists of screen prints, monotypes, an inclusion of large neon works, and a large magnetic board with words printed on magnetic vinyl strips inviting the viewers to arrange and rearrange. Craig’s exhibition title may state the obvious, particularly that his artworks in the exhibition are text-based, but the second half of the title in parentheses, “and other things”, offer a reference to the context of his works. While the words and phrases used in the works hint at some meaning – literal or implied – it is exactly the context within which the works were created. Some of the earlier works use words and phrases derived from a variety of sources (fortune cookies, found scraps of discarded newspapers and magazines, random lists and notes left behind by strangers, images of discarded consumer goods at some site Craig has happened to come by and a variety of randomly found objects), later works increasingly reference various terms and phrases that were derived from political and social comments and rhetoric that became commonplace terms in the era of post truth, alternative facts, and fake news.

The works in the exhibition are based on several streams of source imagery and include old National Geographic covers, simulated chalk board backgrounds, backs of used etching plates, images of found objects, monoprints, comic books covers, and two neon pieces.

Craig incorporates well-used National Geographic covers as a background for superimposed text – words and phrases – which hint at some meaning within the context of political rhetoric, but inevitably the clear meaning is somewhat obscured and left to the viewer to decipher a possible meaning. In addition to the text passages Craig creates, the fragments of titles of articles on the National Geographic covers and spines reference a history of actual events and facts outlined in the articles. The finished prints serve as re-contextualized narratives of historical facts and the current political climate. As in most of Craig’s artwork, the viewers are presented with tactile images of the past, the history of the magazines’ use and a modality of current social tendencies.

The history of some past events is also coded in Craig’s images which use an appearance of a chalk board showing different marks and their repeated subsequent erasure. As in the other works, words and phrases are superimposed over the chalk board backgrounds. Despite the fact that Craig created these backgrounds digitally, there is a sense of an authenticity of past events, their history and human activity. The whole purpose of a chalk board serves as an instrument,

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a low tech device for communication that has been used for decades. The superimposed layers of text are obscured by crowding the text presented in several strata of differing opacities. As the viewers apprehend the images, the possible narratives are not spelled out, but instead, the illusive pairing of interpretation/clarification relies on the viewers’ ability and willingness to engage with the works which may yet reveal a hint of some of the narrative over time.

Most of Craig’s work orientated around found objects present the viewers with apparent or implied histories of his source subject matter which he then develops further by physical manipulation, or at times digitally. Craig’s focus on the histories of mundane objects is also clear in his work using images of old fragments of etching plates. The history of their use is apparent; various random scratches, remnants of ink spots and abrasions, all valuable qualities of an object for Craig’s preference of referencing their history and use. Using the backs of the old used etching plates as a background, Craig physically punched letters, words and phrases into the surface, emphasizing the three-dimensionality of the object itself. As for the selection of words, Craig devises various conceptual strategies of selecting words randomly from a dictionary.

These strategies are reminiscent of the approach used by the Dada artists who emphasized the abolishment of artistic control in favour of harvesting the outcomes created by setting conditions for chance and accident to occur. The resulting grouping of words which Craig punched into the etching place equally may or may not affirm a narrative and are presented to the viewers in order for them to create a possible meaning/interpretation.

Craig’s exhibition also includes a suit of monoprints which is solely based on text manipulation without appropriated images he has used in some other bodies of work. These works are quite minimalistic in their execution and austere in appearance. They were created as purely black and white prints using the vinyl lettering as stencils. Despite the fact that white letters are complemented by layers of black ghost imprints over semi opaque black backgrounds, the individual white words are prominent and clear in meaning, yet as phrases they do not quite spell out a particular meaning. Instead, they serve as an arena for viewers’ personal associative condition to conjure up various parallel interpretations.

Two prints in the exhibition based on the images of old comic book covers are the most recent in Craig’s exploration of imagery and meaning. Just like with most of Craig’s prints, the motifs of an object’s history and its three-dimensionality are apparent. The prints feature images of the comic books’ covers and show slightly torn edges and abrasions. Visually, the books seem portrayed as perfectly authentic, yet Craig has manipulated the text in a playful way in which he has extracted the text balloons from both covers and switched them. In this way Craig created new possible narratives while undermining the original intent and content of the comic books.

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The prints in the exhibition, UV screen prints and monoprints, are complemented by the additional three-dimensional and participatory works. The two neon pieces are standalone phrases which address the viewer directly; one on a personal level, the other prophesying the future of our political and societal existence. The first neon sign consists of a phrase which contains a blinking letter that changes the meaning of the phrase; it either affirms or denies one’s ability of an achievement. The second sign is politically charged in its affirmation of the negative political climate to come.

In order to invite direct hands-on visitors’ participation, Craig included a large metallic board with words printed on a magnetic vinyl strips. The format of the board simulates a chalk board which implies a means of communication. The words are based on Craig’s artist statement for the exhibition which was composed within the context of the exhibited works it consists of.

The viewers are invited to re-arrange the words and create new phrases and thus participate in creating new narratives. This ever changing tableau re-affirms the notion that a meaning of an artwork is not fixed, nor that it is the sole domain of an art maker.

Craig’s exhibition Words on Paper (and other things) uses two different means of communication, one based on the articulation of the meaning in a text format, the second being the visual information in a non-verbal configuration and accessed through the viewer’s associative propensity to find a meaning. The exhibition as a whole seeks to propose and deny any particular linear explanation of the status quo of an individual or a society. It provides a modality for possible narratives which address our individual, societal and global existences.

Lubos Culen Curator Vernon Public Art Gallery

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UTOPIAN VACUUM, 2007, ultra-violet screen print, 40 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney, Digital Perfections

Said the joker to the thief

Briar Craig’s work has long engaged with the early 20th century Dada movement’s love of spontaneity, irreverence, and the endless possibilities of witty wordplay. Until the past year or so, Dada’s revolutionary ideals – and those of many early Modernist groups - seemed less important in any consideration of Craig’s work than their experimental linguistic gambols and their embrace of unorthodox materials. However, the recent body of work produced by Craig, while maintaining its infatuation with the loopy language-based rambles of Dada, seems to reflect Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck’s observation at the beginning of the First German Dada Manifesto that “art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch.”2 Indeed, I would argue that Craig’s recent work is deeply responsive to the time in which we are living. The words of Canadian artist, writer and curator Bruce Barber, delivered in a lecture for the Banff Centre’s 1982 Agit-Prop exhibition, seem almost scripted to introduce the current work that Briar Craig is producing in the fall of 2017. “The intention is not to produce propaganda”, Barber wrote, “but the more urgent need at this time . . . is to demystify and deconstruct forms of contemporary propaganda contained in forms of popular culture, advertising, newspapers and news magazines as well as those examples of ‘live’ political rhetoric that we are subjected to on a daily basis.”3 Craig’s earlier work has received wide international exposure and scholarly attention; the challenge now is to find a reflective space to consider these new works – ones such as WRITTEN IN STONE, POST TRUTH and Trump Card (a.k.a. said the joker to the thief) –which overtly address the turmoil and uncertainty of the contemporary world, a place in which political rhetoric accosts us 24/7 – if we let it - and many wish to simply turn off. To my mind, these recent works are Craig’s most intriguing to date: they are both alarming and bitingly funny (why is the joker in Trump Card screened by bubbles which, when they float over him, seem to gnaw at his contours and make him look like an over-ripe piece of Swiss cheese?), and technically au point.

The possibility of overt political engagement has long simmered in Craig’s work: for example, the National Geographic series draws attention to both the magazine’s iconic status in the popular press (and in the studios of art students), while at the same time the series can also be read as underlining the periodical’s frequent and contested re-presentation of “the Other”, the humans and animals subjected to European colonization’s fascinated gaze. In WHITE WASH PRIVILEGE, one of the latest works in this series, the political commentary is pointed. The work, a composite of layered National Geographic covers, screams its title while the tattered sidebars display short, sometimes pithy captions of the articles within: “Vietnam Memorial”, “American Indian” and “The Nile”, all of them reminding of expeditionary and occupying forces at home and throughout

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IAMBIC HYSTERIA 2012 ultra-violet screen print, 40 x 28 in Photo: Yuri Akuney, Digital Perfections

A Propose de Bottes 2016 ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in Photo: Yuri Akuney, Digital Perfections

the world. Floating behind the cover words is a ragged flag, its fourteen or so stars in the upper left wandering through an unidentified galaxy that can only be the United States. The work feels very current: it ties in nicely to contemporary discourses in Whiteness Studies, and looking at it in the fall of 2017, it is hard not to think of recent events in Charlottesville, South Carolina, and the deep racial divide in the United States in which concepts like white privilege and whitewash drive the ideologies of the alt right.

The latest group of works that are the focus of this essay are sparked by the uncertainty that seems rampant in current global affairs: from the rise of Trump and Trumpism in the United States to the simmering divisiveness brought to full glare during the Canada 150 celebrations, and everything in between. However, before discussing these latest works, I’d like to take a brief look at some of Craig’s earlier text-based images such as UTOPIAN VACUUM (2007) and IAMBIC HYSTERIA (2012) in order to signal the huge shift in his recent work. Craig has long been fascinated with the visual and aural qualities of language (he might well have become a poet if he hadn’t become a printmaker), and the viewer of works such as these is encouraged to not simply read the words but to pronounce them as well. By uttering these poetic bursts, the viewer engages in a highly subjective reading that ultimately yields no fixed meaning. Theorist Roland Barthes’s influential view that it is the viewer and not the author of the work who creates meaning underscores Craig’s approach to all of his work. In UTOPIAN VACUUM, stiff letters loom against the rich rust-coloured craters and scratches of an old copper etching plate. What exactly is a utopian vacuum? It seems very serious but it might just be Craig’s madcap humour. This playful union of a poetic fragment with a hard, unyielding surface continues in recent works such as the chalkboard-based ā propos de bottes (2016), a frivolous encounter between a childlike scrawl and a Dadaist exhortation to think about boots – meaning to think about something quite irrelevant.

The group of recent text-based works in which Craig makes mordant comments on ideas of truth and information in our own day are perhaps the most difficult to access of all his works. They are also the most sinister. In them, Craig presents us with a simulation of the daily barrage of newly-coined media bites such as “fake news” and “misinformation” and “post truth” in works that are virtually impossible for the viewer to penetrate. These works deploy the palimpsest, as does the National Geographic series - the process of layering text over top of text in such a way that words that are underneath can (sometimes) be read. And while the palimpsest originated in the context of writing over top of older manuscripts, it is a highly effective device used in many disciplines to tackle the contemporary globalized world. In A SMATTER OF FACT, we see how an item of news is immediately overwritten by a statement about “fake news”; as the original

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news sinks into the background and oblivion, becoming illegible, the new statement, delivered in repetitive staccato bursts of three word phrases, rises to the top only to be overwritten by denials, clarifications, and the latest round of news, “fake news”, and “alternative facts”. So, too, in MISINFORMATION: the eye struggles to make sense of the top layer of letters while “the sum of all fears” demands attention, hovering just below as scribbles dart between the letters.

In POST TRUTH, the persistent viewer can barely make out an ominous message regarding cooperation lurking below the title. If the earlier text-based works were warm and nonconfrontational in their random wordplay, these latest works are anything but. They are done on slate and the harshness of the white letters on black is a potent reminder that many of these concepts originate in the news media.

WRITTEN IN STONE, a very recent work done on the back of an old zinc etching plate, has four lines of text: LIESCAN/BEWRIT/TENINS/TONE. It doesn’t use the palimpsest yet still makes large demands on the viewer’s ability to combine and recombine words until a meaning becomes clear. Craig admits that some people find works such as this very difficult to read as well. The title is, as always in Craig’s work, open to interpretation: it could be a reference to the authoritative voice of Moses’s Ten Commandments or it might reference the carefully scripted information on tombstones and epitaphs that deliberately mislead and misrepresent someone’s life. In my view, the current controversies about Confederate monuments in the United States, the statues of the generals in London’s Trafalgar Square, and the statue of General Cornwallis in Halifax feel very relevant to reading this particular work. The whole question of how one negotiates a past inscribed in stone and how to mesh it with the values of the present is tricky.

Young Love and Bat Love, both from 2016, are among the few figurative works in the show.

Based on comics, they are a pair: In them Craig transposes text from one image to the other to befuddle and create new and unexpected meanings. Thus the tearful young woman in one is wondering what ails Batman while Batman in the other one is recounting a sexually-charged, almost stalking pursuit of a man entering a coffee shop, and Robin offers an aside hinting at a sexual yearning for Batman. The comics are a mainstay of popular culture and are aimed at a wide audience. However, they too can be subverted, Craig seems to say, through discordant rejuxtapositions of text and image that might also prompt reflection on some of the unscrutinised conventions of our own time.

Let me return to Trump Card – in which the prim little joker fluffs his pantaloons and points his delicate red toes towards the viewer. Did Craig do this work because he couldn’t resist the temptation to play on the name of the American president or was it because he is truly alarmed at the nature of the political rhetoric emanating from the United States? I think it is very much

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the latter – when the work was shown in the US, he changed the name to said the joker to the thief. The joker is a card that is “capable of almost anything or almost nothing, depending on the game.”4 It is a trump card, and not surprisingly, this work is unlike anything else in this show. It is a solo act. But Trump Card and many of the works in this exhibition respond forcefully, I think, to Barber’s call to “demystify and deconstruct forms of contemporary propaganda”. It is urgent that we do so because, as Bob Dylan wrote,

“’There must be some way out of here’

said the joker to the thief ‘There’s too much confusion’, I can’t get no relief……”

Carolyn MacHardy UBC Okanagan

Endnotes 1 Bob Dylan, “All Along the Watchtower”, https://bobdylan.com/songs/all-along-watchtower/. 1968 2 Richard Huelsenbeck, “First German Dada Manifesto” in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, eds. Art in Theory 1900-2000 (Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 257.

3 Bruce Barber, “Vital Speech/Agit-Lecture” in Agit.Prop. Performance in Banff (Walter Phillips Gallery, 1982), 11.

4 www.wopco.co.uk/jokers/index

Carolyn MacHardy is an Associate Professor of Art History in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan. Her teaching areas include Canadian, Global Contemporary and Outsider Art History. She has written a number of catalogue essays on artists in the Okanagan, including Shawn Serfas, Mary Smith McCulloch, Percival Ritchie and Lori Mairs, and she contributed an essay to the catalogue for the 1st Okanagan Print Triennial in 2009. In 2015 she contributed a catalogue essay to pro/con/textual at the Vernon Public Art Gallery. Her current research involves archival photographs and settler memoirs of the early townsite of Benvoulin.

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MUTTER NATION OATH, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 40 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney, Digital Perfections

statement

I have always made extensive use of text in my prints. I have used words and letters like pieces in a game often scrambling or otherwise jumbling them in order to create some confusion and to initiate a re-thinking of what the words might actually be saying. Increasingly, I have been using texts in a more socio/political manner (sometimes jumbled and sometimes not) as a kind of commentary on the current state of the world. Given the divisiveness of the recent federal elections in Canada and the US and in the Brexit vote my work is attempting to provide the viewer with words and phrases they can interpret in their own idiosyncratic biased or un-biased ways.

Ultra-violet cured inks allow the medium of screen printing (a form of mass production/ reproduction) to synthesize refined details and subtlety with the boldness, immediacy and directness associated with traditional forms of propagandist poster making.

Briar Craig

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Briar Craig in conversation with Lubos Culen - December 13, 2017

Lubos Culen To start with, I have an obvious question: What made you decide that you want to become an artist and dedicate your career to research and studio practice?

Briar Craig: Oh god… It is so weird but I don’t remember ever making that decision, it all just sort of happened… As a teenager I always wanted to be a veterinarian but as I progressed through high school I started hating science. But I knew I wanted to go to university and visual arts was a kind of safe haven for me. I could get into university for visual arts and I knew I would enjoy it.

I was really lucky in that neither of my parents ever asked that dreaded question - what do you want to do with that degree? My mother only went to grade eight, my dad went to grade ten and they were just thrilled that their kids wanted to go to university at all. So, I never got that pressure to go to university and study something that was overtly about getting a job. Their belief was that if we wanted to learn something that we could use for the rest of our lives then that’s what we should do – they felt that’s what university is for.

So, I just went. Once I was there it was a complete immersion into trying to be an artist without really having to think about what I would do once I got out of school. It was so liberating. From there, everything just rolled along - one thing rolling into the next. As I was getting close to the end of my fourth year, the other printmaker (the other fourth year printmaker in my class), decided that I needed to go to grad school. She started the application process for me. She was having some health problems so she could not be in the studio for a while and she started filling out the application forms for me. By the time they came to me there was really nothing to do except put a sheet of slides together and send the applications off. I was lucky enough to get into a number of grad schools and eventually decided on the University of Alberta. I headed off to Edmonton to do that and everything continued to roll along. I got my first job teaching at the University of Minnesota just before I graduated.

So, you went to university… What media did you study?

Queens University is where I got my undergraduate degree. The way they had their program set up was in modules. You didn’t really take individual courses. Everyone was funneled through all of the different media areas for the first couple of years and then students would slowly self-select their preferred media areas. So, for the first six weeks of first year, my class studied drawing then we moved on to six weeks of sculpture and then to painting, etc. My very first module was in drawing with Carl Heywood who later become my printmaking mentor.

I remember him being quirky and strange and captivating and I thought to myself ‘he is a

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printmaker and he is cool and he draws so well… that’s what I will be then!’ And that was it. In my head, from that moment on, I was going to be a printmaker. I did not get to take my first printmaking module until my second year and I didn’t take screen printing until third year and I didn’t take lithography until I was in the last half of my fourth year. But throughout all of first and second year I just had it in my head that printmaking is what I was going to do and it was mostly based on the charisma of this one character. I still think Carl is probably the most influential teacher I have ever had. Even though early on he was teaching us drawing there was something simpatico about the way he expressed things. His way of teaching and his way of looking at the world just made sense to me.

I remember that when we met sometime in the early 1990s, you mentioned that you did painting, but, eventually, it became predictable for you… What did you mean by that?

I had primarily drawn and painted before I went to university and, based on the way I had been painting, I knew that I could picture something in my head and then make it happen on canvas.

So, there was no adventure on the journey from start to finish. I probably wasn’t a very good painter because of that - because I pictured something and then tried to make it real but that is a whole other thing. In the end, for me, it just wasn’t as fun as something unpredictable. So, I leaned more toward sculpture and printmaking because they felt much less control-able. For me anyway. I suppose I could have manufactured that loss of control in painting by working in different ways, but, in the end, I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t know how.

When you were at the University of Alberta, was it a focus solely on printmaking?

Yes, the U of A program, at that time anyway, was very media centric - you would get accepted as a printmaker or as a painter or as a sculptor and there was not a lot of intermixing. All of the students would take academic classes together but, for the most part, there were no studio classes that we took together.

Also, during your time as a practicing artist with a focus on printmaking, you produced work in a variety of media; I remember lithography, for instance: could you perhaps talk about your preferences for different media before you started to work primarily in screen printing?

Screen was really the first print-based medium I learned in any depth. But, back in the eighties, my impression was that screen printing took a lower position in the hierarchy of all the other

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printmaking media. I always perceived lithography at the top along with etching and then somewhere down a number of rungs on the ladder was screen printing. No one really seemed to take it very seriously. Early on, there were a number of international shows that just didn’t accept screen prints. I think they were considered too industrial – too much function and not enough art perhaps. I think I fell into that way of thinking a little bit. So, as an undergraduate and then as a grad student, I conditioned myself to think that I was going to be a lithographer because I saw it as the apex of the print world.

And, lithography is a pretty fantastic medium. Every few years I teach it again and it reminds me how much I love it. Drawing on a litho stone is like drawing on nothing else in the world. It is luxurious. But the process itself can be quite slow. I like colour and I like layers of overlapping colour and I found it much more satisfying and much faster to work in layers through screen printing. So, it was easy to make a shift back to screen printing. Once I made that switch back I realized how much I had always really enjoyed the processes in screen printing and I realized I didn’t need to worry about the hierarchy I perceived. And maybe that part was just perceived by me alone, but, in the end, I felt that I just didn’t need to worry about it anymore.

Yes, you have been working in screen printing for quite some time; what attracts you to this medium?

Under the larger umbrella of printmaking, it is a relatively fast process and you can get a number of layers of colour printed in a day and see a dramatic shift in a work over a relatively short period of time. I just don’t know if there is any other print medium where you can get that kind of variety and do that amount of layering in such a short period of time. Because I was working so much with colour, screen printing suited me much more than any of the other print media. And, I have to say, I have never gotten tired or bored with the process. Every time I pull a squeegee I can’t wait to lift the screen to see what has happened.

Ironically, many of the prints in this exhibition tend to appear to be black and white but they are still made up of layers and layers of colour. It has just happened that some of the source imagery - old slate chalk boards, black pieces of cardboard with chalk on them – were primarily monochromatic but I have always liked how colours can work together to create the illusion of virtually any colour including blacks and greys. And, when a viewer gets in close to the prints they can see all of that intermingling of colours so the prints work differently from different viewing distances.

I would like to touch on the subject matter. Your works have been often about the portrayal of ordinary if not discarded objects and many time even detritus people dispose of and yet, you seem to be attracted to these abandoned and found objects; why?

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I could not really say exactly why I like discarded things, but it is true that I have always been attracted to Pop Art imagery. I always liked Warhol, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg and Rosenquist, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. I have always liked that kind of reference to the social, cultural and consumerist environment that I live in and that I grew up in.

I am the person when I am walking around the street and see something that catches my eye those things tend to be discarded. Finding something interesting and beaten up is an event somehow. And I really think about those found things… they have a history and a built-in narrative for me. They tell a story. Years ago, I made a whole series of images from Oreo cookies that I found at an abandoned picnic. There were some Oreo cookies left on the ground and that became the whole body of work because it was a kind of amazing event to be walking along and suddenly see these cookies half ground into the dirt sort of poking out and looking sad but Oreo-ish. As objects, they had that Pop sensibility to them and it was just fun to play with them as subject matter and, for me anyway, there was a whole narrative about how they came to be discarded. Or, at least I hoped viewers would create some kind of narrative for themselves because of the way the cookies were pictorialized on the ground.

If I am walking along and I see a crumpled newspaper and can only see a part of the headline, I will spend the rest of the day trying to figure out what the rest of that headline was and typically I would be making up things that are funny – responses that would make me laugh. I like playing with words. That kind of thing can occupy my mind all day. Walking in a big city you are going to see lots of junk on the street and that is a kind of splendor for me. I get so captivated by all this junk and trying to figure out how the ‘junk’ could be added to and finished. How one thing could be put together with another to create some interesting dialogue. I don’t know if that makes any sense but it is where most of my ideas come from.

Your exhibition Words on Paper (and other things) is a grouping of works that were based in different source imagery streams, yet all contain text and text symbols and some are strictly text based. Can you comment on works that have found objects as a source imagery for your prints?

In our studio visit conversation you mentioned that you are interested in the history of use of the objects…

I think that comes from those found things, you know, whenever I find something that has been stepped on or driven over or it is just weathered in some way I have always liked that apparent sense of history. When you pick them up and study them closely, I love the overt tactility of worn corners and scraped up surfaces. The tactility of a weathered thing is just as attractive as the thing itself. That weathered quality does suggest some kind of history and I think that we as viewers are drawn into a dialogue with things that have clearly had a past. Those perceived histories are especially important when you are combining different objects or putting words

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over top of an object. I am hoping there is a resulting dialogue between all of those parts – the objects, the words, and the histories. Whether it is a clear history or just a presumed history, I think it adds another layer of meaning to the whole.

I think tactility also suggests a level of authenticity too. A kind of believability. I am not interested in reproducing an object but I am very interested in creating a believability for the viewer. I want the combination of elements that I am putting together to feel somehow real and authentic – as though all of the parts actually existed together in reality. So, when I am looking for stuff, there is a certain tactility I am looking for that lends authenticity to the sense that someone can look at what I have done and think it actually happened or actually existed.

A part of the selection of prints for the exhibition uses old etching plates with some text physically punched into them and then used as a source imagery. The original plates were small in size but then produced into large prints. What was your inspiration producing these works?

Well, the little plates… Every art program that has printmaking tends to have all these little old etching plates kicking around and people use them for tests. There is almost always a collection of these old discarded plates, and the fact that they have been kicking around for a long time and they were used before, cause the backs of them to get really scratched up. Those scratches become quite a bit more noticeable when they get enlarged. The plates are scratched up in a way that has to do with printmaking, but I have no control over those marks – they are found.

The fact that the plates are made of metal allows me to hammer words and marks into them. It is a fantastic way to embed words authentically and convincingly into an interesting surface…

I think that my initial impetus to do that was to make this juxtaposition of surface and words feel very concrete, that this exists and has a physicality, in part, to add weight to the words. You can’t ignore words that have been forcibly hammered into another surface and I want viewers to spend a bit of time with those words and consider them for themselves.

I don’t know exactly how I first started doing that… Again, I just fell into it. We had metal letter punches kicking around the studio and I wanted to see some words on a plate and I sort of hammered them in and then didn’t think much more about it. That first test plate just kicked around in my desk drawer for years. But, one day I pulled it out and thought - wow, I can make a print of this. I think that metal lends itself to a sense of solidity and concreteness and then hammering into that also lent some credibility to those words. The words are not accidental, somebody put them there. I think that, I am going to use the word authenticity again… there is a sense that these things have an authority and authenticity and should be thought about.

Briar, when it comes to the selection of words, you devised various strategies as to how a word will be selected. That was first, now with these metal plates, there start to be hints of social and political messages. Could you comment on that?

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I can (laughter)… I have always liked the things I discover or find far more than the things I try to make. One way that has manifest itself is that I have stumbled onto various systems of chance as the starting point for many of my works. It is a definite nod to the approach that a lot of the Dada artists took. One of my favorite strategies involves the random words that appear at the top of a page in a dictionary. One denotes the first word on the page the other denotes the last.

For one reason or another I have always paid attention to those two words and I have collected the most interesting accidental combinations – combinations of words that would suggest some larger ideas to me.

Incidentally, when I had the last exhibition in Vernon, back in 2007 I think, I did an artist talk and there was a young woman who asked very specifically about the political nature of my work. I never really thought of my work as being political before, but her question made me realize that when I stand back and look at prints like MUTTER NATION OATH and UTOPIAN VACUUM, they do have that kind of socio-political feel to them. Up to that point those choices were unintentional or at least sub-conscious, but I became aware that in fact I had chosen to focus on those particular word combinations and maybe there was something political lurking in me that I was just starting to let out. There are millions of accidental word combinations out there, but I chose the ones I did perhaps because they did suggest something of a socio-political nature. Over the years, it has just become a little more coherent and a little more focused. I am increasingly looking for accidental word combinations that resonate in more significant ways.

For the last eight years, I have also lived with my partner, Sarah de Leeuw - a socially active, radical feminist writer and academic who believes that we should be fighting government and changing things and pointing out problems that exist and I think Sarah’s influence has been huge.

That maybe I can and should say something with what I am doing. The words I am using aren’t purely accidental and they don’t have to only be about playing with things that are humorous.

I think that this latest body of work has become much less about humour and much more poignant in the topics it is broaching. But it is still rooted in the same games that I invent to play with words.

This leads me to another question: You also used old National Geographic covers as source images which were further manipulated with an addition of words, and again, the words and texts conjures up a political context; could you please talk about these works?

When I first started to use National Geographic covers, pages and pictures, it was because they are so ubiquitous in a visual arts setting. Virtually every visual arts program in the world has tons of National Geographic magazines kicking around because students use them as collage materials. That is really why I started using them – they were readily available and plentiful and often they were cut up in unexpected ways. And again, at that show in Vernon I started realizing all the things I am putting on top of those magazine covers are actually having, albeit

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accidentally, some sort of dialogue and it is often a social or political dialogue with the images or with the list of articles that come down the side of the spines of the magazines. There is some kind of discussion going on there between the words I have been choosing and the information on the magazine itself. I think at first I used National Geographic because it just has such a presence - everyone recognizes it thinking it is a place of authority, or presumed authority. And increasingly as the text has become more politicized, I think that dialogue is becoming stronger.

When I did the very first Natural Geographic work it was literally something like twentyfive magazines stacked together and I scanned the spines and the resulting image, for me, became about the interplay between all the different titles and all the different things listed on the spines. I kind of still loosely consider all the National Geographic-based prints a part of the Nostradamus series. I do think of National Geographic as either foretelling the future or recapping the recent past in a really succinct way. When you actually put a bunch of magazines together you start noticing all the different articles that were written, it really does tell a story about what has been happening and it almost seems to predict what is going to happen from all of that information.

A few prints allude to a surface of a chalk board with some text superimposed over it. The text appears over some chalk scribbling and erasure. Despite their fairly simple structure, they are quite dynamic visually and very politically charged… Could you comment on that?

They came out of what I was doing with text superimposed onto the National Geographic magazines. I started looking for something that was more just about the text and not about this other interplay between text and an image. I have always collected things like old public school slate chalkboards and I had a bunch kicking around and occasionally I would use them. And when I would pick them up, I noticed something… you never completely get rid of the previous thing – there is always a vestige of what was last written or drawn on the surface. Those traces made me think this is where the dialogue could be - one layer of text that has been largely removed or is somehow incidental and a new one that has been superimposed on top. That sort of palimpsest thing has always appealed to me. You can still see that in a lot on the sides of buildings in old warehouse districts where signs have been painted and then new signs painted over top. You can see a whole history in the pile up of layers of different texts. That overlap has always appealed to me visually, but also it gives me a place to play – like the newspaper headlines I was referring to earlier - and I start making connections between what those things were and what they are now.

Yes, the layers of history… a history of an action, event…

I go through these phases where I don’t really want to deal with the complexity of pictures

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anymore. I just want to deal with texts. The chalk boards were a perfect surface on which to do that. There is still a pictorial-ness to the form of the chalk board, but it is not like I am combining texts with an actual, pictorial photograph, so it satisfied both things. Recently I have gone back to imagery with pictures in them - trying to see if this new language that I have been developing, the more political thing, can start to work more effectively with the pictures as well.

Are these images concerning the images that feature the comic books covers?

One of my students, Pam Turner, started to work with comic books a few years ago and it made me start thinking about when I was a kid and the comics that I had. This is going to be a long round-about answer, but one of my partner’s areas of specialization is in First Nations and Indigenous health and I have come to understand the problems Indigenous People in Canada experience, largely through the things she is informing me about as part of her research. When I was a kid I was a huge “cowboys and Indians” fan. I loved western movies and I loved war movies and things like that. A significant part of my comic book collection were western comics. And the “Indians” were almost always portrayed in a really specific way and not in a particularly flattering way. I didn’t know it at the time but I was experiencing the disturbing racialized stereotyping of those 1800’s era Indigenous cultures as told through a 1960’s comic book. When my student started using comics in her work and with an up-dated perspective on Indigenous cultures in the west of North America I thought I’d like to see some of those old comics again. I thought about using those 1960’s images and scenarios but up-dating them by injecting contemporary information. But, when I went on e-bay looking for comics I had owned I couldn’t find any of them which was unfortunate because I wanted to have this little nostalgic experience knowing I would read the comics completely differently now in the 21st century. While I couldn’t find any of the comics I remembered, I did stumble on an e-bay sale, which was a lot of two comic books.

You didn’t have a choice, you had to buy both of them and, in explicably, there was a Young Love and a 1960’s Detective comic of Batman. When I bid on them I only really wanted the Batman comic but when I got them, when both of them arrived, I realized how easily interchangeable the text was between them. Again, that sense of play. I discovered that I could take the dialogue boxes from Young Love and put them on Batman and completely change the context of Batman and vice versa. And that just seemed like a fun thing to do.

This is all going to come back to the idea of being a kid fascinated by “cowboys and Indians”.

I wanted to do something with old comic books which portrayed Indigenous people in a very dated, racialized way and update it somehow with the way I understand things now. I have not had a chance to do that yet. I have not been able to find comics with the right images, but it seemed with the Young Love and Batman comics I was able to experiment with swapping texts to end up with something culturally and societally interesting.

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Also Briar, in this exhibition, in addition to all of the text based prints, you have included some neon signs; where did the idea come from?

Well, I have always loved neon. Neon signs are so much a part of my childhood fascination with going downtown – into the city. I grew up in the suburbs of Toronto and when we would all go downtown, everything seemed to be made of neon. It was just this beautiful, magical thing. So, I have always really liked the idea of neon and the idea of working with neon really came from just thinking about how I could get texts in a different form into a gallery. Neon also has that authority I have spoken about. Words spelled out in neon virtually need to be considered. So, hopefully the text I have chosen to present in this way is somehow a little bit more layered in content than if it was just words printed on the wall. But really it was a chance to play with a medium I have always liked the look of.

One of the largest pieces in the exhibition is this metallic board and a number of words printed on magnetic strips ready for the viewers to assemble to phrases or sentences in an ever-changing display. There seem to be certain randomness and yet, the boards become a medium for communicating ideas between people…

I hope so. You know, prints on paper hanging on the wall… they’re nice… great. It is a wonderful experience to go to the gallery and see works on paper, but they don’t necessarily invite a high level of physical participation from the audience. Yes, I do want the audience to participate and think about the words and the juxtapositions I have made but the works themselves are fairly static on the wall. The interaction is more cerebral than physical. Because I feel like I am being invited to participate with the objects I see, find and collect (finishing that sentence in a headline in my mind, etc) I wanted to create an opportunity for the viewer to come and participate with the work and do something more than just read it or stand back and look at it passively. The idea of fridge magnet poetry, I don’t know, who doesn’t like that? Everyone seems to like playing with those things and putting together phrases they want to say. So, that is where I started working with magnets. This particular work is literarily words taken out of my artist statement. I printed them onto magnetic vinyl so viewers can move them around.

It all ties in with my belief in the Roland Barthes contention that the viewer is more responsible for the content in a work than the author is. Once an art work is made and put it out there for someone to look at it, it is theirs - they can do whatever they want with it. So, really, this is an example of just presenting component ‘bits’ to the audience and then letting them do whatever they want. Anyone can take my words and arrange them to say anything they want. They are still words from my artist statement but they can be reconstructed and adjusted to play off that viewer’s own histories, ideas and thoughts and their sense of fun and their sense of poignancy or whatever.

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I have a question which you partially more or less covered. It was about your methodology in general: you work with found objects and devise strategies on how to generate words or phrases, but you also mentioned working with and manipulating colour, which is very important to you and many of your prints have multiple layers numbering into dozens…

They can, yes…

What was the greatest number of layers you have ever printed in one image?

I don’t know for sure, but I think it was around two hundred and fifty or so. That was on an older work…

Was it the Complete Works of Shakespeare?

It was the Complete Works of Shakespeare – Abridged. I was literally trying to build up ink thickness so it is not like there was a lot of printing that was really changing the look of the work.

Probably 90% of all the printing on that piece was just changing the thickness of the ink on the surface of the paper, trying to make that print really dimensional and tactile. It wasn’t long after I made my return to screen printing from lithography and it seemed like an important thing for me to do. Screen prints have traditionally been very, very flat - the ink hugs the surface of the paper.

In litho, the same thing happens, but the ink is actually driven into the surface of the paper by pressure and there is an added richness to that. In etching, the surface dimension of a plate itself embosses into the paper and I think the ink has an entirely different presence. Screen printing has always been really, really flat and from the Complete Works of Shakespeare – Abridged onward I have been developing screen prints that try to take things off the surface of the paper so that the ink would sit a little bit above that surface. That whole Shakespeare project involved impressions of lead-type letters and trying to make them stand up on the print as though they stood up in relief. So, it was literally layers and layers of printing just to try to build the thickness of the words so they would stand up and challenge the notion that screen prints are always flat.

A part of your practice is a digital manipulation and work when you are developing and preparing the images; have you developed a certain methodology, or is the image development a process driven approach?

I am not sure what you mean by process driven approach, but I know only enough Photoshop to do the things that I have done – really basic things like colour separations, simple erasures, etc. Whenever I learn something in Photoshop, it is because one of the students has shown me. I am as inept as anyone can possibly be with any kind of technology and so students have been teaching me how to use these things. I do find Photoshop a fascinating tool to manipulate and combine things that would not normally be easy to combine. Certainly not in the old days

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where we had to make a photo positives in the dark room. That was always awkward and time consuming. Photoshop does all of that more seamlessly. So, I think I am just using Photoshop to get a start on making a print knowing that as soon as I start to print things they will need to go where they need to go depending on the imagery. I often start with CMYK colour separation layers and print them in maybe a one third or half strength colours. After four layers of printing you got really wishy-washy version of the image, but then you can start adjusting those colours and pushing them and making them into something different and making them better or more varied than the real object/image was – or maybe just more intense. I can choose to highlight certain areas and underplay others and so on. Sometimes I wonder if I have been relying on a source photograph and the computer and the computer output a little more than I should; but, ultimately, I feel like working that way is simply providing me with a starting point. It is providing me with a lot of tonal information that can easily be printed and then I can allow an image to develop as an image instead of as a stark reproduction of an object that I found.

When I am printing from a magenta separation screen, for example, I can have everything from the deepest richest magenta all the way to the most light and airy pinks all in one pull of the squeegee. I find that really exciting in that these tools can help us generate that kind of breadth of tone and that breadth of colour. So, on a multi-layered print, when you get ten, fifteen or twenty layers of ink each containing a full range of colour and tone, then the richness and sense of visual authority can really become quite significant.

Yes, it built from layers that have their unique history in the process of developing and printing an image…

In a way. Getting back to that sense of history… Multi-layered prints also have a sense of history and my hope is that there are so many layers the photographic mechanicalness is somehow buried in amongst of those layers and the experience we have with the imagery isn’t one dominated by an overtly photo-mechanical appearance. The prints are still quite photographic but hopefully you don’t see the mechanicalness of those photo images and, along the way, the colour becomes more dimensional and more rich and subtler as well - more dynamic in chromatic and tonal range I guess. Does that make any sense?

Yes, it is a complex process, but it seems obvious that you like hand-pulled processes and tactility, as you mentioned. Yet, some of the prints have that three-dimensional quality; you used to portray crumpled pieces of paper where the creases look totally three-dimensional...

Yes, the dog-eared corners of a comic book or National Geographic magazine that is forty years old and has been read a hundred times, or two hundred times... I think that those visual qualities

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are conveyable and they provide tactile information to the viewer to better draw them into the work. There is certainly a ‘process’ aspect to printmaking and, in general, I think that most printmakers are never fully in control of it. We might have a purposeful intent for a given work but when you actually print something, it is always different from what you expected. Then you kind of have to work with that and play with that and see how that can be fixed. I like that. I have always thought of the process of printmaking as working with a slightly evil collaborator that will always take your best intentions and kind of mess with them. Then it is like, oh crap!, that didn’t work the way I wanted it to, what will I do now? Like I said earlier, printmaking has always been a little more unpredictable and a little more like I am walking a tight rope somehow. And I am usually mostly off the tight rope and I enjoy that. It is weird because actually I think the work that I make seems very controlled, especially because it is photo-based. I think it appears quite restrictively controlled and yet what I am often responding to are the accidents that have happened and the changes that take me away from what my source imagery really looked like.

The colours and tones I can create are quite different. There is always a reference to those original things, but I am not trying to reproduce them. The processes available to me through screen printing are varied enough and evil enough that I can never actually reproduce something photographically – an image will always move in another direction.

Can we talk about the monoprints in the exhibition? You talk about chance and accident despite the fact that the process is very controlled and yet, with the monoprints you got these ghost deposits...

Yes, they were such happy accidents! I made almost all of the monotype prints at NASCAD in Halifax. I was there for a residency a few years ago and UV screen printing was not available to me so I decided to play with monotypes – something I hadn’t done for years and years.

They have a fantastic print shop there where, amongst other things, they can cut vinyl. I got the idea to have words cut backwards in vinyl and to stick them down to a Plexiglas plate and then ink up the plate around and over top of the vinyl words, peel the vinyl off and print the inked plate. While that was fun to do it was also kind of boring because it just ended up being a black background with white words in the middle. So, I started thinking about how could I manipulate that black background? I tried not inking the plate up fully – in essence drawing with the inky roller around the words. That was more interesting. They use a very distinct solvent at NSCAD, it is not really a solvent but synthetic ester that softens and dissolves ink, but it needs to be washed off afterwards with soapy water because it leaves a greasy-like residue that ink won’t stick to. While printing one day I had cleaned the Plexiglas plate but I hadn’t washed all of the ester off properly. So, when I went to ink the plate up, the traces of the ester resisted the ink preventing it from adhering evenly to the plexi-glass plate. I started to see hand prints and smudges and marks that had been left over from the previous cleaning process. All of these

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unexpected marks started coming up and it was brilliant. It was a fantastic experience. At first all I could think was Oh my god, where did those marks come from? I didn’t do that. I was just trying to roll it up solid. That inadvertent occurrence became really exciting...

The more I played with the ester the more fun it was making images. Over time, I discovered the ester stuck to the vinyl letters more than it did to the surface of the plexi-glass which made the letter shapes much more resistant to the inky roller than the surrounding plate. That resulted in these wonderful ghost-like impressions of the words appearing in unexpected places on the surface of the plate. The results were always haphazard and entirely impossible to control. It was a month of never knowing what was going to happen. Sometimes the results were great and sometimes‌ such a mess. But, it was entirely fun. I want to experiment more with monotype processes but never seem to have the time. It is something that is definitely in the cards for the future though.

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images of works in the exhibition

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DESERVE WHAT YOU WANT, 2014, ultra-violet screen print, 40 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

WHITE WASH PRIVILEGE, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

A SMATTER OF FACT, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

POST TRUTH, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

MISINFORMATION, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

THE END, 2016, ultra-violet screen print, 30 X 40 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

UNITY MAKES STRENGTH, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 42 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

WRITTEN IN STONE, 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 42 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

Trump Card (“Said the Joker to the Thief”), 2017, ultra-violet screen print, 28 x 21 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

CAGE FREE POETRY, 2013, monotype print, 49 x 34 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

HIS MILK DRIBBLES, 2013, monotype print, 49 x 34 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

ARE YOU HERE, 2013, monotype print, 49 x 34 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

Bat Love, 2016, ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

Young Love, 2016, ultra-violet screen print, 41 x 28 in. Photo: Yuri Akuney: Digital Perfections

THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN’T DO, 2017, neon, 48 x 120 in. Photo: Briar Craig

MORE LIES TO COME, 2016, neon, 36 X 72 in. Photo: Briar Craig

What’d I Say (2017), 2017, powder coated steel, screen print on magnetic vinyl, 76 x 140 in. Photo: Briar Craig

Briar Craig CURRICULUM VITAE Born

Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 1961

Education

M.V.A. (Printmaking) University of Alberta, 1987 B.F.A. (Printmaking) Queen’s University, 1984

Professional Experience

2005 – present, Associate Professor, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, British Columbia 2008 – 2012 Visual Arts Coordinator, University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus 2005 – 2008 Head, Department of Creative Studies, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies, University

of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, British Columbia 1991 – 2005 Associate Professor, Okanagan University College, Kelowna, British Columbia

(printmaking, drawing, photography) 2004 – 2005 Chair, Department of Fine Art, Okanagan University College, Kelowna, British Columbia 2009, 2012, and 2012 Co-organizer of the Okanagan Print Triennial Exhibition (with Lubos Culen

curator of the Vernon Public Art Gallery and Liz Wylie, curator of the Kelowna Art Gallery)

Selected Solo and Small Group Exhibitions

2018 Words on Paper (and other things), (solo exhibition), Vernon Public Art Gallery, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada (catalogue) 2017 Words on Paper, (solo exhibition) Vedant Art Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria

2015 Between the Lines, (solo exhibition) SNAP - Society of Northern Alberta Print Artists, Main Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Pro-con-textual, (with Mark Bovey and Ericka Walker), Vernon Public Art Gallery, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada (catalogue) Briar Craig: Urban Clever and Stephen Lee Scott: Urban Cool, Headbones Gallery, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada (catalogue)

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2013 Poetry Perchance, (solo exhibition) Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada 2012 Briar Craig: Oddments, (solo exhibition), Kelowna Art Satellite Gallery at the Kelowna International Airport, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada Briar Craig: Between the Lines (solo exhibition), Malaspina Printmakers Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Accidental Poetry (solo exhibition), Artist Proof Gallery – The Alberta Printmakers’ Society, Calgary, Alberta, Canada Briar Craig: Through the Screen, (solo exhibition), The Drawers Gallery, Headbones Gallery, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada (catalogue) 2011 Accidental Literacy, (with Pascaline Knight, Becky Ip, Denise Hawrysio, Judy Major-Girardin and Lisa Turner) The Print Studio, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada 2010 Writing on the Walls (a five-person juried exhibition celebrating the art of handwriting) Desotorow Gallery, Inc., Savannah, Georgia, USA 2009 Mad About the Waltz (solo exhibition) Two Rivers Art Gallery, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada 2007 That Way and This, (solo exhibition), Vernon Art Gallery, Vernon, British Columbia, Canada (catalogue) 2005 Eclectica, (solo exhibition), The Cecelia Coker Bell Gallery, Coker College, Hartsville, South Carolina, USA Fragments, (solo exhibition), Maple Ridge Art Gallery, Maple Ridge, British Columbia, Canada 2004 Replay, (solo exhibition), Latitude 53 Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Selected Exhibitions

all exhibitions are invited, juried or otherwise peer reviewed except where specifically noted 2018 9th International Printmaking Biennial of Douro 2016 (invited artist- curated by Nuno Canelas), Lamego Museum and Douro Museum (Régua), Alijo, Portugal

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Selected Exhibitions continued 2017 Light/Matter: Art at the Intersection of Photography and Printmaking, 1954 – 2017, (invited artist), Grunwald Gallery at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN, USA Global Matrix IV, (juried by Kathryn Reeves, Kimberly Vito, Sean Caulfield and Craig Martin), Robert L. Ringel Gallery and the Stewart Center Gallery at Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA 3rd Global Print 2017, (invited artist), Lamego Museum and Douro Museum (Régua), Alijo, Portugal Groteskowe Wariacje, International Centre for Graphic Arts, Centrum Gallery, Krakow, Poland International Print Alliance Exhibition, Jinling Museum of Fine Arts, Nanjing, China 2017 Wheaton Biennial: Printmaking Reimagined, Beard and Weil Gallleries, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, USA 16th Lessedra World Art Print Annual Mini Print, the Lessedra Gallery, Sofia, Bulgaria (participated in the Lessedra World Art Print Annual from 2004 to 2017 with the exception of 2011) 2016 Stand Out Prints 2016, (curated by Elizabeth Wyckoff, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the St. Louis Art Museum), Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, MN, USA (Prize Winner) International Print Exhibition, Canada and Japan, (curated by Liz Ingram and April Dean), Kyoto Municipal Art Museum, Kyoto, Japan; and, The Tokushima Museum of Modern Art, Tokushima, Japan International Print Alliance Exhibition 2016, (invited by Mark Bovey), Taimiao Art Gallery at the Beijing Working People’s Cultural Palace, Beijing, China; Nanjing Jinling Art Museum; Tianjin Art Museum; Shijiazhuang Art Museum; and Shenzhen Guanlan Original Printmaking Museum, China 8th International Printmaking Biennial of Douro 2016 (invited artist- curated by Nuno Canelas), Lamego Museum and Douro Museum (Régua), Alijo, Portugal International Print Triennial Krakow-Falun 2016-2017, Art Gallery at the Dalarnas Museum, Falun, Sweden and at MEKEN, Smedjebacken, Sweden I Witness: Activist Art and Social Movement Politics, (juried by Krista Wortendyke and Margaret LeJeune), Heuser Art Center, Bradley University Galleries, Peoria, Illinois, USA The Ninth Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition – BIMPE IX, Federation Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia 2016, A State of Mind, Lamont Gallery, Frederick R. Mayer Art Center, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, USA A Little Bit of Infinity – An Exhibition of International Print Art, University of Alberta Museums Galleries at Enterprise Square, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada 2015 International Print Triennial – Krakow 2015, Main Exhibition, Contemporary Art Gallery Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow, Poland

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2015 Resonance, (curated by Jiaqi Wu with the assistance of Guy Langevin), 30 Canadian Printmakers, Shengzhi Art Centre, Beijing, China 2nd Global Print 2015, (invited artist), Lamego Museum and Douro Museum (Régua), Alijo, Portugal 2015 35th Bradley International Print and Drawing Exhibition, (juried by Beth Grabowski), The Contemporary Art Center of Peoria and the Heuser Art Gallery at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois, USA The “Iosif Iser” International Contemporary Engraving Biennial Exhibition, The Ion Ionescu-Quintus Art Museum of Prahova County, Ploiesti, Romania 2014 7th International Printmaking Biennial of Douro – 2014, (invited artist – curated by Nuno Canelas), Lamego Museum and Douro Museum (Régua), Alijo, Portugal Americas 2014: all media exhibition, Hartnett Hall Gallery, Minot State University, Minot, North Dakota, USA (Merit Award Winner) 2nd International Print Biennial 2014 Cacak, Cultural Centre and Art Gallery, Cacak, Serbia texttexttext: (a group exhibition exploring text based work by all genders), (juried by Monika Szewczyk), Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, USA Works on Paper NYC III, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, Long Island City, New York, NY, USA The Eighth Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition – BIMPE VIII, Federation Gallery, Vancouver, British Columbia 2013 Boston Printmakers 2013 North American Print Biennial, (juried by Dennis Michael Jon), The Art Institute of Boston, 808 Gallery, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, USA (Prize Winner) Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition 2013, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (Honorable Mention) Global Print 2013, (invited artist), Lamego Museum and Douro Museum (Régua), Alijo, Portugal The 28th Annual Tallahassee International Juried Competition, Museum of Fine Arts, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA VI Splitgraphic 2013 – International Graphic Art Biennial 2013, Stara Gradska Vijecnica Gallery, Split, Croatia How Simple Can You Get? (juried by Robert Storr), Creative Arts Workshop Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, USA International Contemporary Miniprint Kazanlak 2013, Museum Chudomir, Kazanlak, Bulgaria Americas 2013: Paperworks, Hartnett Hall Gallery, Minot State University, Minot, North Dakota, USA The tenth edition, The “Iosif Iser” International Contemporary Engraving Biennial Exhibition, The “Ion Ionescu-Quintus” Art Museum of Prahova County, Ploiesti, Romania

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2012 Imprima 2012 - Mostra Internacional de Gravura, Casa de Cultura de Sobral, Sobral, Brazil (Second Prize Winner) 6th Biennial Juried Print Exhibition, (juried by Ian Ruffino), Northern Arizona University Art Museum, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA (Third Prize Winner) 2012 International Print Triennial - Istanbul 2012, Mimar University Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey Lettra – Krakow 2012 / Sign and Letter, (curated by Teresa B. Frodyma), Jagiellonian Library, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland Works On Paper NYC I, Jeffrey Leder Gallery, Long Island City, New York, NY, USA Tribuna Graphic, (invited artist), Art Museum of Cluj in association with Tribuna Magazine, Cluj, Romania The Seventh Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition – BIMPE VII, Federation Gallery and Dundarave Print Workshop, Vancouver, British Columbia 2011 3rd Qijiang International Print Invitational Exhibition, China, (invited artist – selected by Guy Langevin), Southwest University Museum of Art, Qijiang Xincheng District, Qijiang, Chongqing, China Biennale Internationale D’Estampe Contemporaine de Trois-Rivieres, Maison Hertel-de-la-Fresniere venue, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Canada IV International Print Exhibition, Istanbul 2011, (curated by Richard Noyce), Tophane-i Amire Gallery, Istanbul, Turkey Canadian Impressions, The Inter American Development Bank (IDB) Cultural Center Art Gallery, Washington, DC, USA International PRINT Exhibition – Pacific Rim Meets Istanbul (curated by Cathryn Shine and Alex Wong), (part of ISEA Istanbul 2011), FASS Art Gallery, Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey 3rd Qijiang International Print Festival, Qijiang Farmer’s Printmaking Institute Exhibition Hall, Qijiang Xincheng District, Qijiang, Chongqing, China 2010 The Sixth Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition – BIMPE VI, Federation Gallery and Dundarave Print Workshop, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada (Honorable Mention) 2nd Penang International Print Exhibition 2010, Penang State Art Gallery and Tuanku Fauziah Museum and Gallery, Penang, Malasia Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition 2010, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand 2010 International Printmaking Symposium and Exhibition: The Futurity of Contemporary Printmaking, (invited artist – Canadian prints curated by Carl Heywood), National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan 5th International Printmaking Biennial of Douro – 2010, Pavihao Gimnodesportivo de Alijo and Museu do Douro, Alijo, Portugal Miniprint Finland 2010 - Seventh International Miniprint Triennial, Lahden Taidemuseo, Lahti Art Museum, Lahti, Finland

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2010 International Print Network (International Print Triennial) Krakow- Oldenburg, Artothek Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany International Print Triennial – Vienna 2010, Kunstlerhaus, Vienna, Austria 2009 6th International Trienniale Colour in Graphic Art: Tradition and Identity, Torun 2009, (invited artist), Wozownia Gallery, Torun, Poland International Print Triennial-Kraków 2009, Contemporary Art Gallery “Bunkier Sztuki”, Kraków, Poland The 4th Splitgraphic Biennial, The Museum of Contemporary Graphic Art, Split, Croatia Triennial “PrintArt” Kraków – Katowice 2009, “Rondo Sztuki” Gallery, Katowice, Poland 2nd Guanlan International Print Biennial 2009, Guanlan Museum, Shenzhen, Guanlan, China 2nd Qijiang International Print Invitational Exhibition, Qijiang Farmer’s Printmaking Institute Exhibition Hall, Qijiang Xincheng District, Qijiang, Chongqing, China 6th Novosibirsk International Graphic Biennial, (invited by Canadian curator, Mark Bovey, NSCAD), Novosibirsk State Art Museum, Novosibirsk, Russia 6th International Triennial of Graphic Art Bitola 2009, N.I. Institute and Museum, Bitola, Macedonia New Prints 2009/Winter @ Columbia College Chicago (works selected from International Print Center New York New Prints Autumn and Winter 2008 for Global Implications: Southern Graphics Council Conference), 1066 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL, USA 2008 1st International Print and Painting Biennial – Istanbul 2008, Isik University and IMOGA - Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts, Istanbul, Turkey (Special Prize of the Coca Cola Company Winner) Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition 2008, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand (Selection Committee Award Winner) International Print Center New York, New Prints Program 2008, Autumn, International Print Center New York, New York, USA 1st Kulisiewicz International Graphic Arts Triennial IMPRINT 2008, Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland International Mini Print 2008, Graphium – Timisoara the 3rd edition, Arts Museum from Timisoara, Romania The Fifth Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition – BIMPE V, Federation Gallery and Dundarave Print Workshop, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada 2007 5th Novosibirsk International Graphic Biennial, Novosibirsk State Art Museum, Novosibirsk, Russia Gyeongnam International Art Festival 2007 – International Multiple Art Exhibition, (curated by Yong Sik Kim), Gyeongnam Art Museum, Masan, Gyeongnam Province, Korea International Print Biennial in Guanlan, China 2007, Shenzhen Guanshanyue Art Museum, Guanlan, Shenzhen, China 71

2006 Americas 2000: Paper Works, Northwest Art Center, Minot State University, Minot, North Dakota, USA (Award Winner) 2006 Inklandia: An International Print Exhibition, (invited artist), Yue-Kong Pao Hall of Visual and Performing Arts, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA The 14th Space International Print Biennial 2006, The Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, Korea 2005 4th Biennale Internationale D’Estampe Contemporaine de Trois-Rivieres, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec, Canada Cultural Foundation International Graphic Biennial Cluj, Cluj-Napoca Art Museum, Cluj-Napoca, Romania The “Iosif Iser” International Contemporary Engraving Biennial Exhibition, The Art Museum of Prahova County, Ploiesti, Romania MTG Kraków Pays a Visit to Hungary, Polish Culture Institute Gallery, Vigado Gallery, Duna Gallery, and Millenium Park, Budapest, Hungary 2004 The Third Biennial International Miniature Print Exhibition – BIMPE III, Dundarave Print Workshop and New Leaf Editions, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; and, a second venue for the exhibition at Gallery San Chun, Calgary, Alberta Triennial 100 Cities – Prints from the Four Quarters of the Globe, Cultural Center, Gallery Ostroleka, Ostroleka, Poland and Cultural Center “Castle”, Contemporary Art Gallery “Profile”, Poznan, Poland

Honors, Awards, etc

2017 BOMB Magazine Award, 91st Annual International Competition (on-line exhibition juried by Kelly Baum, Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Curator of Contemporary Art – Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Jennifer Farrell, Associate Curator, Drawings and Prints, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), The Print Center, Philadelphia, USA2016 Standout Prize, Stand Out Prints 2016 – an international juried exhibition, Highpoint Center for Printmaking, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA (juried by Elizabeth Wyckoff, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Saint Louis Art Museum) 2014 Merit Award Winner, America’s 2014: All Media Exhibition, Northwest Art Center, Minot, North Dakota, USA 2013 Juror Selected Prize (donated by McClain’s Printmaking Supplies), Boston Printmakers 2013 North American Print Biennial, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A. 72

2013 Honorable Mention, Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition 2013, University of Canterbury, Chambers 241 gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand 2012 Second Prize Winner, Imprima 2012 - Mostra Internacional de Gravura, Casa de Cultura de Sobral, Sobral, Brazil Third Prize Winner, (juried by Ian Ruffino), 6th Biennial Juried Print Exhibition, Northern Arizona University Art Museum, Flagstaff, Arizona, USA 2010 2nd Place Winner, Open Studio Canadian Printmaking Awards, Open Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2008 Special Prize Winner (sponsored by the Coca-Cola Company), 1st International Print and Painting Biennial – Istanbul 2008, IMOGA - Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts, Istanbul, Turkey Selection Committee’s Award recipient, Pacific Rim International Print Exhibition, University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand 2007 Juror’s Discretionary Award, (Archana Horsting – Kala Art Institute), 19th National Exhibition sponsored by the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, Riverside Art Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA 2006 Merit Award Winner (juried by Stephen Glueckert – Missoula Art Museum), Americas 2000: Paper Works, Northwest Art Center, Minot, North Dakota, USA

Curatorial Experience 2016 Long Range Exchange, (co-organized with Lacia Vogel), an exchange exhibition of prints from the University of British Columbia Okanagan and the University of Regina, FINA Gallery, UBCO and the 5th Parallel Gallery, University of Regina 2015 The 3rd Okanagan Print Triennial, (co-organizer and co-juror with Vernon Public Art Gallery Curator, Lubos Culen and Kelowna Art Gallery Curator, Liz Wiley), Vernon Public Art Gallery (catalogue produced) 2013 Paper Exchanges: an international juried and invitational print exhibition, (co-curated with Katie Brennan and Mary Smith McCulloch) Lake Country Art Gallery, Lake country, British Columbia, Canada (catalogue produced) 73

Curatorial Experience continued 2012 The 2nd Okanagan Print Triennial, (co-organizer and co-juror with Vernon Public Art Gallery Curator, Lubos Culen and Kelowna Art Gallery Curator, Liz Wylie), Kelowna Art Gallery (catalogue produced) Proof Positive II, co-curated by Briar Craig and Heather Leier from the printmaking classes at the Okanagan campus of the University of British Columbia, Vernon Public Art Gallery 2011 Traditions and Transitions, curated by Briar Craig (Mark Bovey, Jesjit Gill, Dana Tosic, Robert Truszkowski, Laura Widmer), Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna, BC, Canada (catalogue produced) 2009 The 1st Okanagan Print Triennial, (co-organizer and co-juror with Vernon Public Art Gallery Curator, Lubos Culen and Kelowna Art Gallery Curator, Liz Wylie), Vernon Public Art Gallery (catalogue produced)

Published Essays

It is Brave to Want to Be and Artist, 2017, exhibition catalogue essay for Emergence, Vernon Public Art Gallery (pages 8-9) ISBN 978-1-927407-35-6 Nostradam Us: The National Geographic Series, 2013, Geographical Review (vol 103, issue 2), edited by Dr. Bimal Paul (pages 210-218), ISSN: 1931-0846 Richard Suarez and the Grown-Up Sandbox, 2013, exhibition catalogue essay for Richard Suarez: Quantumspaces, Vernon Public Art Gallery (pages 10 – 13) ISBN 978-1-927407-07-3 Print Making – the Democracy of a Mobile Art Form, 2013, Paper Exchanges exhibition catalogue essay (pages 4 – 7), Lake Country Art Gallery Building a Community of Printmakers, 2012 exhibition catalogue essay, Contemporary Bulgarian Printmaking, Vernon Public Art Gallery (pages 8 – 11) ISBN 978-1-927407-04-2 Traditions and Transitions, 2010, exhibition catalogue essay; catalogue design (with Laura Widmer), Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, (pages 4 – 13), ISBN 978-0-9809827-2-5 2009 Okanagan Print Triennial 2009, exhibition catalogue essay, Vernon Public Art Gallery, (pages 20 – 30) ISBN 978-0-9812147-0-2

Selected Collections The International Print Triennial Association (SMTG), Krakow, Poland Museum of Kozara, Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina The Art Museum of Cluj-Napoca, Cluj, Romania Penang State Art Gallery, Penang, Malaysia

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Istanbul Museum of Graphic Arts (IMOGA), Istanbul, Turkey Splitgraphic Biennial, Museum of Contemporary Art, Split, Croatia University of Canterbury, Print studio, School of Fine Arts, permanent collection, Canterbury, New Zealand The Japan Print Association, Yokohama, Japan Guanlan International Print Biennial Organizing Committee, Guanlan, China Purdue University Galleries Permanent Collection, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA The Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada The Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada The Kelowna Art Gallery, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada The Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada The University of Alberta Museums and Collections, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada The University of Minnesota, Morris, Morris, Minnesota, USA Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Citibank Canada, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Briar Craig: Words on Paper (and other things)

vernon public art gallery vernon, british columbia canada www.vernonpublicartgallery.com

Briar Craig | Words on Paper (and other things)