PAPER PUSHERS
Curated by Annie Adjchavanich - (May 7th-June 19th, 2016)
Paper Pushers showcases works on paper by esteemed artists across the nation. Works in letterpress, screen printing, block prints, illustration in an array of themes including: animals, the figure, biology, and pop, skate and surf culture manifest upon paper substrate. Featuring work by: Carlos Hernandez, CR Stecyk III, David Amoroso, Elizabeth McGrath, Karen Hsaio, Kevin Bradley, Laura Jane Hamilton, Martin Mazorra, Miso.
David Amoroso shows his admiration for Latin culture through his artwork. His artistic passion is divided between painting, photography, and block and screen prints. Although the majority of David’s work is dedicated to painting iconic portraits of everyday people, he also represents Mexican pop culture through his work. His involvement within the Latino art community has allowed him to create Mexican altars for Día de los Muertos and Guatemalan Alfombras de Aserrín. His art has brought him to exhibit and work in the DC Metro area, California, Arizona, Mexico, Central and South America.
The work of Houston-based serigraphy artist Carlos Hernandez has been featured in the 2011 Communication Arts Typography annual, the 2011 & 2012 Communication Arts Illustration annual and was also recently published in the 2012 book Mexican Graphics by Korero Books-UK. He has designed and printed gig posters for such artists as The Kills, Arcade Fire, Kings of Leon, Santana, and more. Most recently, he was selected as the official poster artist to design the commemorative poster for the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival. Carlos serves as an instructor of Screen Printing at Rice University, Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts.
Craig R. Stecyk III lives and works in Los Angeles. As a result of familial and neighborhood connections in the Venice and Santa Monica areas of Los Angeles, Stecyk grew up around car “customizers” and auto-style progenitors like George Barris, Dutch Darrin, Gil Ayala, Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, Von Dutch Howard, Phil Hill, Dean Jeffries and Ed Iskenderian, as well as legendary surfers and board builders Dave Sweet, Dale Velzy, Miklos Dora and Greg Noll. In the late 1970s, as an original member of the “Dogtown” skateboard gang in Southern California, Stecyk changed the look and attitude of skateboarding forever. He began his career as a surfboard designer and graphic artist while working out of the small Zephyr surf shop. Stecyk is considered one of the first to incorporate many outlaw elements of surf and skate culture into the equipment and attendant gear. He is perhaps best known as a documentary photographer. His articles and photo essays of the 1970s for Skateboarder magazine set a standard for throngs of rebellious individualists to follow.
Los Angeles-born artist Elizabeth McGrath has always had an eye for the strange beauty in the grotesqueries of life; this appreciation is nowhere more evident than in her work. Inspired by the relationship between the natural world and the detritus of consumer culture, she brings forth a new cavalcade of creatures from the darker corners of the streets, the city, the imagination. It is this melancholy interaction between man-made status symbols and suffering specimens of nature that make up her intricate body of work.
Karen Hsiao is a figurative painter in her early years, Hsiao has since explored the figure and its space through various mediums, creating pieces that are both tactile and intuitive. Photography was a natural extension of that process which Hsiao has sought to perfect. Her work has captured the attention of many primary because of her unique approach to her subject, sometimes with a team of ingenious makeup artist, hairstylists, and couture fashions designers to help materialize Hsiao’s concept. Hsiao has been featured in published works and shown in galleries both nationwide and abroad.
Kevin Bradley is one of America’s most prolific letterpress printmakers. From his early days at Hatch Show Print in Nashville to his 15 year run as the founder of Yee Haw Industries in Knoxville, Tennessee, his work has been instrumental in redefining the idea of contemporary letterpress. Bradley is well known for his political humor and the US Presidential candidates had offered up plenty of fuel for the fire. The work for the PAPER PUSHERS show is an early glimpse into the “SH*T SHOW” series in which he will hand-carve portraits of all twenty candidates.
Martin Mazorra is a Brooklyn based artist, originally from West Virginia. The woodcuts he makes are hand-drawn and hand-carved and hand-printed. The letterpress is moveable type, and printed on a Vandercook press. Mazorra loves the unique characteristics of wood type, and the slight differences between letter forms. The combination of woodcut and letterpress provides editorial content and graphic impact, while preserving the individuality of the hand that makes the cut.
A graduate with a BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, Miso’s work is presented through a variety of mediums including paintings, sculptures, drawings, and etchings. Her art is often stimulated by her interpretation of the known and her experimentation with the unknown. Fascinated with biology, pathology and the science of evolution, Miso has sought to fabricate a world in which strange creatures, born of her making, exist and thrive among us. These homunculi are organic representations of the term that provides her name. A Miso is an organic representation of an, or many existing organisms, such as fungus, plants, insects, animals, or microorganisms. Miso currently works and resides in Los Angeles, California.
