Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban, Ordinal Sold (North), Digital print on phototex
As artists and collaborators, Studio Art Professors Leslie Mutchler and Jason Urban are interested in the handmade (hand-printed) and the duality of actual and virtual, experience and meta-experience. Both have multiple degrees in printmaking and have been working for several years to make relevant the archaic and dying craft of print.
Their exhibition, Ordinal Solid opened at the Cecille R. Hunt Gallery at Webster University, St. Louis on February 2, 2018 and will be on view until March 9, 2018. Ordinal Solid is the third exhibition of a body of work based on the library as a curated, collaborative and performed space. Previous iterations were exhibited as Babel Unbound in Cork, Ireland and Babel Revisited at Space Gallery in Portland, ME. In Ordinal Solid, photographs, large-scale digital prints, and vinyl text paginate the gallery walls referencing over-sized pages from a book. A compass-like instrument, an archive of sorts, firmly positions itself central in the space. Objects, such as magenta finger-cots, a chunk of magnesium carbonate, 3D printed totems and a meteor fragment tell a story rich in materiality and lost in contemplation.
Performing the Book, a single-channel video, explores both the tactile handling of loose pages, while bound, and references the magenta-fingered scanning process at Google Books Library Project. With the book in motion, relationships emerge and dissipate within seconds, making the magic of browsing visible and highly aesthetic.
In March, Mutchler and Urban's work will be featured in a solo exhibition with the Center for Fine Print Research (CFPR), University of West England in Bristol. The exhibition, of strange shadows, will be an investigation of color, print and collective memory. Contrasting a subdued primary palette with gray images of residual protest and violence, artist-collaborators Mutchler and Urban look back to the 1960's and 1970's as captured in printed matter from the same era. The installation of layered digital prints evoke the smoking and obscured remnants of a civil strife and political tumult at once too familiar and yet distant. The layering of large-scale, abstracted images printed on everyday bond paper suggests the ephemerality and fragility of any one generation's defining moments.
The University of Texas at Austin's Department of Art and Art History hosted CFPR's senior research fellow Paul Laidler in its Guest Artist in Print Program exhibition, Just Press Print, and artist talks.