transactions and translations
ashlee mays
artist statement
When we look at the history of printmaking, we are looking at history of technology. This history gives us a physical portrait of what ideas and of what images were important enough to mechanize. Nowadays we do not rely on movable type to get us our daily news. We do not depend on the reliability of the artist hand to depict accurate information. Printmaking (or the technology of repeatability) was the first information revolution. We are experiencing another information revolution, and this one did not appear out of thin air. Through a study of printed history and studio practices, I hope to draw in the seemingly invisible lines that connect our day to day experiences with a larger mechanism. The parking ticket you got last week, the souvenir from your last vacation- these artifacts all have a complex history. They quietly shape an experience that you are actively participating in.
biography
Ashlee Mays was born in Lima, Ohio. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Mays has had the privilege of working with a variety of printshops in various capacities, including Hatch Show Print (Nashville, TN), Hoofprint Workshop (Chicago, IL), Spudnik Press Cooperative (Chicago, IL), and more. She is the co-founder of Twin Peaks Press and Pretty Good Printmaking. Through both of these cooperatives, Mays works in designing and printing books, posters, and works by others. She is also passionate about gardens and those who keep them.
dana potter
artist statement
My artistic interest cultivates in cartographies of time and movement. I map human body movements through analog and digital machines, for example tracking the eyes with computer software, location with Google Maps, or gesture with my own built apparatuses. Between the studio and machine I investigate my actions as intuitive or programmatic, active or passive, scientific or visceral. The investigation leads me to see how these binaries inevitably collapse into one another, becoming neither here nor there. Collecting, arranging, and organizing become my means for exercising futile control and alleviating my anxieties of experiencing the infinite with limitations of time. The convoluted processes I use to make or involve people in making, help me to question “how is the value of time and labor translated,added, or reduced through a series of steps and technologies” and “what is the perceived or assigned value of a result (manifested as a tangible art-objects)”. By translating invisible activities into physical objects the information feels more real, personal, and controlled.
biography
In late August 2017, Dana Potter began attending graduate school at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Drawn to the highly ranked printmaking program, Potter is among the first class of recipients of UT’s Tennessee Fellowship for Graduate Excellence. As a current Master of Fine Arts candidate and graduate teaching assistant, she instructs timebased media for the foundations program. Potter completed her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa, with a minor in Interactive Digital Studies. Thereafter, she was singled-out for a unique, international undergraduate fellowship in printmaking from Southern Graphics Council International. She then spent a year in Minneapolis, Minnesota, completing an education internship for Highpoint Center for Printmaking and a gallery assistant internship with the Soap Factory. In the past five years Potter has exhibited nationally and internationally in locations including: Douro, Portugal; Atlanta, GA; Minneapolis, MN; Louisville, KY; and Portland, OR.