Nature, Tamed and Wild: Works By Zea Mays Printmakers

August 2-September 2, 2024

Verdigris Gallery, 1 North Main St., Essex CT

Opening Reception Friday, August 9, 5-7

We are in the sweltering midst of another lush New England summer, with the natural world at full throttle. Life is pulsing all around us, voraciously consuming and vigorously replicating. Nature, in full exhibition mode. At the same time, crucial aspects of our natural world are changing, under threat, being whittled away.

Fittingly for this moment in time, this show explores the ways in which we interact with and interpret nature – from the cultivated and controlled to the raw and unbridled – presenting fifteen printmakers’ visions of the  living world. Some depict life we have invited into our own homes and gardens, the flowers, fruits, birds and other creatures that ‘play nice’ and behave (more or less) politely and companionably therein. Others focus on life that exists untamed and wild and beyond human oversight – conveying the tangled beauty of the vines and shrubs and trees that surround us, or portraying creatures, real and fantastical, in all their beauty, strength, and vulnerability. And many explore the interwoven relationships of the natural world to humanity: the deep meanings that animals (and their symbolic stand-ins) hold for us; our impact on and inextricable interdependence with our planet’s ecosystem; the fragile and faltering balance between the two. Through diverse mediums and perspectives, these works invite viewers to contemplate their own connections with the living world, and its personal meanings for them.

Zea Mays Printmaking Studio, located in Northampton MA, is renowned for its green approach to printmaking. For a quarter century, this studio, founded and led by the pioneering artist Liz Chalfin, has conducted extensive research into identifying & inventing safer printmaking materials & techniques, that protect both the artist, and the earth, from the acids, solvents and other ecologically harmful chemicals used in traditional printmaking practices.

This show features original, hand-pulled prints curated from the Zea Mays Flat Files collection. These works represent a wide range of printmaking techniques – etching, wood- & linocut relief, lithography, photopolymer and drypoint intaglio, and monotype processes. They also give a small sense of the incredible breadth of artistic styles embraced by printmakers of today.

-MK Wynn, Curator