Symbolon
SYMBOLON: SYMBOLS AND SELF asks printmakers to approach the concept of personal symbolism by depicting self through a combination of both literal and symbolic likeness.
The word symbol is derived from the Greek word symbolon. Ancient Greece was full of tricksters, robbers and con men. A man who wanted to pass a true message to a friend who lived many miles away had a problem. The solution was to use a "symbolon." The one sending a message deliberately broke an object in two and gave half to his friend before he left. If the messenger brought the other half of the object and they fit together, then the messenger was the right person and the message true. The half of the shard he kept and the half he gave to his friend was a symbolon.
Symbols are implied or obvious, universal or personal. Throughout history, artists have expressed or evoked particular emotions and ideas either by choosing representational objects or images, or by stressing the symbolic value of line, shape, color, and form to evoke a state of mind or to communicate otherwise inexpressible visions of reality.
Juror's Statement
Printmaking has, at its very heart, a sort of identity crisis. The printmaker puts hours of effort into working a metal plate, slab of limestone, plank of wood or block of linoleum. But in the end these objects are cast off - they are only the necessary negatives, the parents from which the real prints are born. The parents may be more solid, more real than the prints themselves, but finally the image is what matters, peeled off, disembodied almost, into a thin sheet of paper. But the question still lingers: which of these is the original? Which is a symbol of the other?
The premise of this show goes right to the heart of this uncanny process by asking artists to pull a print of their own image - to somehow embody themselves in a print.
So, these prints try every angle and every degree of abstraction to get at the subject. They are full of moments of doubling, reflection, repetition, fragmentation and reintegration - collectively they imply that making an image of oneself is no easy affair, that it requires a good deal of courage to interrogate oneself, grapple with conflicting self-images, and find an adequate stand-in for oneself. Many of the resulting images are complex, using multiple schemes for representing multiple sides of the self, though a few attempt to boil the image down to a single body double.
The resulting symbolons ask us to extrapolate back to their authors, to discover the qualities, thoughts and decisions that will lead us to get a sense of something as irreducibly unique as a self.