Artist Ewa Tarsia of Winnipeg remembers the first print she ever made as a teenager in her uncle's studio in Poland. His press was about 100 years old. Her etching, she remembers, was "very bad." But seeing the newly pressed print was a revelation.
"It's so amazing," Tarsia said, "because it's not like you put a mark on a canvas with a brush or a pencil. It's magic, really."
Aug. 23, Tarsia will open her exhibit "Absolute Dot" in the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks, beginning with an artist's reception at 7 p.m.
The Polish-born and educated artist works in painting, sculpture, tapestry, landscape design and drawing, but she is known internationally as a printmaker. This exhibit will feature the printing plates themselves, the pieces of plastic from which she makes her prints, covered with marks, lines and color.
"Each plate is visually complex," says NDMOA's description of the exhibit, "offering a fully active and engaged surface that, once transformed into sculpture, reveals both the artist's obsessive process and the beauty that motivates her to continue."
ADVERTISEMENT
A printmaker carves the surface of a plate, draws the images she desires and embellishes the plate with color, Tarsia said.
"When you put that paper under the press, you more or less know what to expect, but until the end, it's unknown," she said. An artist may plan, but she never knows exactly what will happen, she said.
Tarsia lived in Gdansk, Poland, until 1988, then in Vienna, Austria, until moving in 1991 to Canada with her husband, Ludwik Tarsia, a cabinetmaker. She worked as a graphic designer for a time, exhibited her work in Winnipeg and around the world and curated other exhibits. In 2007, she was inducted into the Royal Academy of Arts. Her work is part of the collection at UND, and she's also sold some of her work through art auctions at North Dakota Museum of Art.
What's dot?
"Absolute Dot" started from a Winnipeg Martha Street Studio show last year called "Untitled Dot," a name she chose, Tarsia said, because everything comes from the environment and when you examine nature closely, you find you are looking at dots.
"Because I was thinking of environmental issues, more and more I was thinking my dots could be almost anything -- political, sexual, anything," she said. So "Absolute Dot" became a show that made a statement.
"Dot is elegant. Dot is curious. Dot is environmental," she said. "If you go to my whole exhibition, it tells you something. It's a statement." Tarsia said rather than writing a statement about "Absolute Dot," she'd like viewers and critics to find their own message in her work. The titles of her works often are clues to what she had in mind.
"This is not empty, colorful playful work," she said. "In spite (that) it looks so happy, every time I paint I am full of different issues in my mind. So, that is why I create my titles. I always try to say something."
ADVERTISEMENT
As an environmentalist, Tarsia said, she sees the irony of using plastic printing plates and paper to create images that celebrate the beauty of the natural world.
"It is really like a contradiction," she said. "I hate and love plastic. I could give you thousands of examples of how people treat plastic like it is invisible. Milk, bread, everything comes in plastic, and we treat it like it is invisible."
On the other hand, an exhibit like "Absolute Dot" takes a contemporary approach through recycling, because its images come from the plates she already has used to make prints. Why should those plates be put in a warehouse, or end up in a landfill, when they could be used as pieces of art themselves?
Reach Tobin at (701) 780-1134; (800) 477-6572, ext. 134; or send e-mail to ptobin@gfherald.com .
