past exhibitions

David Scott Armstrong's creative practice explores the connections between materiality, reproducibility and time through a variety of mediums. For the last ten years, he has been concerned with the relationship between perception and representation. Armstrong is particularly interested in printmaking as an organic and mechanical, singular and serial, temporal and spatial, process. 

Shinsuke Minegishi’s printmaking practice is grounded in traditional processes and formal compositional explorations. Through lithography, woodcut and wood engraving Minegishi merges rich layers of colour and texture with bold graphic forms and delicately refined engravings of symbolically charged images. His works are amalgamations of representation and abstraction that bring together Eastern and Western imagery and printmaking traditions.

For her exhibition Trembling Bog Judd looked to Sifton Bog in London, Ontario, as a means of addressing broad implications of our methods of understanding and our relationships with nature. Influenced in part by her uncle, Dr. William W. Judd, a biologist that worked to preserve Sifton Bog, Judd traverses ways of knowing and practices of recording that are conventionally associated with scientific investigation.

Malaspina Printmakers is pleased to present “Super Human Be-in” by Elizabeth Zvonar.  This solo exhibition is a selection of the work created through the first Print Research Residency developed by Malaspina Printmakers to facilitate new print media based projects for artists.  Zvonar’s research began with studying original copies of the Georgia Straight from 1969 – 1970 when the publication initially positioned itself as an alternative voice to the mainstream media. The resulting prints that developed for the exhibition represent a distillation of her research into the Georgia Straight and images from magazines and early underground press as a way to look at the purpose of such media and what kind of role it played in society then, juxtaposed against how it operates today.

Malaspina Printmakers is pleased to present “Visualizing the Urban/Rural Divide” a solo exhibition of woodcut prints by renowned printmaker Karen Kunc. Influenced by the time she spends in urban environments and her home in rural Nebraska, Kunc’s imagery evokes concepts of the interdependent and often imbalanced relationship between humans and nature and the cyclical processes of life. As a Visiting Artist in Residence, Kunc will be creating new prints in the Malaspina Printmakers studio for the month of June and will be giving an artist talk of Thursday June 5th, 2008 at 6pm.

PaperCut is a limited edition folio featuring three Winnipeg-based visual artists who work in the medium of cut-paper: tamara rae biebrich, Doug Melnyk and Paul Robles. As cutpaper is a process of reduction, this particular folio blurs the lines between original collage, varied editions and hand-embellished prints. The limited edition PaperCut folio comprises ten 20” x 20” silk-screened images on paper: three prints by each artist as well as a rare collaborative print produced by all three artists.

 In an age of digital image production, printmakers using traditional methods are forced to re-evaluate the merit of their craft, and whether it transcends the efficiency of new media. The mezzotints of Masataka Kuroyanagi are a testament to handcraft, commenting on the nature of time through dialogue between their production and visual content. 

 Malaspina Printmakers is pleased to present Source: New Prints by Liz Ingram, an installation of new prints that explore our fragile connection with the source of life; water. This new body of work by Liz Ingram revolves around the “investigation of transitional states between material presence and the ‘spiritual’”. 

Thomas and Philippa Iksiraq are among the founding members of the Baker Lake Printmaker’s Co-Operative in Nunavut. Their images speak to the contemporary challenges faced by the Inuit people as they stand at the brink between a nomadic way of life that was tied closely to the land and a lifestyle heavily influenced by Western values and ways of living. Through their practice, Thomas and Philippa seek to maintain their history and culture for the next generation of Inuit people and to tell their stories to the world.

Vancouver artist Amy Pelletier, examines the psychology of collectors and the compulsion of collecting through her recent body of digital prints in which images of objects from collections are layered to create strange new forms. Pelletier's artistic practice is based in the curation and arrangement of collected objects resulting in forms that provide insight into theoretical circumstances and anthropomorphized scenes. Through Collector Pelletier questions notions of beauty and value, the amassing of images and the way in which the individual object gains meaning through the set to which it belongs.

Malaspina Printmakers is pleased to present an exhibition of graphic art and prints by Ayşegül İzer and Emre Senan. This exhibition is an opportunity to view recent work from Istanbul produced by two Professors of Art at the Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University.

Please join us for the Opening Reception March 26, 2009. Artists will be in attendance.

Hard Candy is an exhibition of the newest works by emerging artist Jade Yumang.  Comprised of nine portraits, Hard Candy is a series of work that articulate a carnality that is at once bawdy and delicately sensual.  Though explicit at first glance, Hard Candy delves beyond a young, raw homoeroticism and presents images that speak to the essence of physicality and questions stereotypical power dynamics and gender roles.

 Malaspina Printmakers is please to present its Annual Members Exhibition and Summer Fundraiser Hot Off the Press.  

Comprised of original prints from Malaspina Printmakers’ membership of over 200 local, national and international print artists, Hot Off the Press showcases a wide range of original, hand-pulled prints, in media such as lithography, intaglio, woodblock, mixed media, monotypes and digital. All works in the exhibition are ready to hang and can be taken home at time of purchase. As the show proceeds the exhibition is constantly changing as new work is hung. In addition to the exhibition, Malaspina Printmakers has over 800 unframed prints available for sale.

Each year, Malaspina awards the Print Research Residency to a local artist who has no printing experience. Eli Bornowsky was the recipient of the award in 2008. Over the past 6 months he has worked closely with Andrea Pinheiro to learn multi-plate etching, relief, and drypoint. Sleep 1, 2, 3, 4 presents some of the work developed during his residency.

Malaspina Printmakers is please to present Horizons, an exhibition of photo-woodcut prints by Anna Szul. Horizons is a series that builds upon Szul’s metaphoric use of specific land formations common in the costal landscape, moving from the solid formations in the land to the ineffable spaces at the edges of perception. As the recipient of 2009 Visiting Artist Residency, Szul gathered source images for the prints while hiking the West Coast Trail, a 75km-backpacking hike along the southwest coast of Vancouver Island and then returned to Malaspina’s studio to developed Horizons.