Work by Kathy Puzey, Amanda Lee, and Holland Larsen
SEPTEMBER 13 – NOVEMBER 1, 2019
Amidst is an exhibition of current works from artists and full-time USU faculty Kathy Puzey, Amanda Lee, and Holland Larsen who use printmaking to explore their relationship with their surrounding natural environment. Each piece begins with quiet observation, an artist teasing out the experience of moments in-between, amidst the external and internal.
Printmaking is essential to the formation of the images. All three artists showcase elemental characteristics of printmaking in their work–marks created by carving into wood, layering of ink to create depth of color, multiples and repetition, democratic distribution of ideas, and half-tone images.
Duality and experience of nature are a through line for all three artists. Puzey is fascinated with the back-and-forth of wilderness and control. Her humility in the face of nature is contrasted with a tugging urgency to impose, inspect, and rearrange. Lee mediates the experience of nature through the mechanics of photographic image and explores the rational versus the intuitive with hand drawn marks and selective opacity. Larsen abstracts nature and its systems, ones that contain and gather, to make an object from image. Intentional and intuitive marks balanced with formal considerations of color, form, and pattern guide the content of each piece.
*Featured image: Holland Larsen, Accumulation, Relief & monotype, 2019