Printmakers and Their Art Given Their Due at MiraCosta, Southwestern Exhibits

Printmaking, like photography, has long been relegated to a secondary rank among the arts. The reproducibility of prints and photographs and their use as both informational and artistic media have linked them more to the functional task of communication than to the rarefied realm of art.

A small but well-chosen show at the James Crumley Gallery at MiraCosta College (One Barnard Drive, Oceanside) renders moot this argument for inferiority, while a large show at the Southwestern College art gallery (900 Otay Lakes Road, Chula Vista) reminds us that whether or not a minor art, printmaking has its share of minor practitioners.

The MiraCosta exhibition features the work of four printmakers whose expressions range from the fantastic to the socially critical and whose techniques span an equal breadth.

Kathi McCord’s delicate aquatint etchings recall the social satire of 18th-Century British printmakers as well as the more dreamlike imagery of fairy tale illustration. McCord dresses animals in human clothing and casts them in wry dramas, such as “Museum Lunch,� in which a robust lion leans on a demure, domesticated cat, or the more whimsical “Happy Hour,� in which Frankenstein charms a little girl with a flower while his bride shares a drink with a crocodile, all in the guise of normal bar behavior.

Anja Schoenbeck and Michelle Burgess both evoke the natural landscape in their abstract prints, Schoenbeck through vibrant combinations of zigzags, spirals and blocky cutout shapes, and Burgess through subtly eloquent textures and tones.

Velvety black veins divide the space in Burgess’ aquatint and line etchings, cracking their rectangular surfaces into organic fragments. Free of references to scale or context, the images read as pure interplays of form as well as eroded rock walls and cavernous voids. Rich and engaging, yet minimal, they suggest the timeless solidity of stone.

Domingo Ulloa, whose home in El Centro makes him the only artist in the show not living in San Diego, uses the dramatic contrasts of linoleum-cut prints to empower his social realist imagery. In one print, a woman appears to be picking the pocket of her dance partner while others sit anxiously awaiting their turn on the floor. Another, dated 1948, issues a biting commentary on a labor struggle.

In slim, sinuous strokes, Ulloa carves the image of a hefty, cigar-chewing man--the archetypal boss--facing a group of painters on strike. The boss, unsympathetic from the start, lets loose a barrel-full of alligator-like creatures, whose human heads bear painters’ hats and gnarly hands grip brushes as they slither through the legs of the picketing workers. Ulloa’s work extends printmaking’s rich tradition of social protest and gives this show a depth that belies its modest size.

“Florence Prints,� the exhibition at Southwestern College, features a broad array of works made at the Santa Reparata Graphic Art Center in Florence, Italy. Made throughout the center’s 18 years of existence, the prints show a reverence for the figurative tradition in art and for formal design and decoration over deep philosophical content.

Michael Schnorr, an instructor at Southwestern and a founder of Santa Reparata, is one of the few artists included whose work engages the mind and not just the eye.

Schnorr’s prints, incorporating color Xerox transfers, embossing and hand-set type, can be conceptually demanding, witty and politically astute. His “24 Hours on the California Freeway� presents three views of a coyote found dead on the road. The text beneath is printed using ink and paper made from natural materials found on the site.

In “Intaglio Irreverente,� the tongue-in-cheek Schnorr demonstrates several stages of the printmaking process, including biting the plate (immersing it in an acid bath), which he represents literally with the marks he made by sinking his teeth into a large metal plate.

Schnorr’s self-consciousness of the processes he employs, his political sensibility--evident in his works relating to the Mexican border--and the visual acumen of a handful of other artists save the show from sinking into a sea of irrelevance and mediocrity.

“Florence Prints� ends today. The exhibition at MiraCosta continues through April 22.

San Diego artist Barbara Weldon reaches in new directions in two new series of work at the Thomas Babeor Gallery (7470 Girard Ave.), but, as usual, a cloying attachment to decorative palatability restrains her stretch.

Her tentative--if not downright safe--sensibility suffocates the “Indochina� series, a group of collages based on a recent trip to Bali, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Within a highly controlled grid structure animated by calculated diagonal rays, Weldon melds together the paper residue from her trip--the luggage tags, hotel brochures, currency exchange receipts, stamps and newspaper clippings.

In most of the works, on paper and canvas, she subordinates this miscellaneous memorabilia to unified pink, peach or blue color schemes. The series suggests an extended diary of observations and experiences, but in actuality it delivers only a mildly creative answer to that stack of papers that always piles up on a vacation--material filled with memories for the traveler but only generic scraps to the rest of us.

Weldon begins to loosen up in her “Jazz Dance� series, abstract paintings suggesting musical and bodily rhythms in space. But here too she finds safe refuge in pre-digested material, in this case a style of calligraphic Expressionism explored previously by Franz Kline.

Though attractive, Weldon’s large canvases lack the spontaneity and energy of Kline’s work. Her paintings on paper, however, do approach these qualities.

With a palette reduced to black and a narrow spectrum of gray and putty, Weldon’s configurations of lines in space achieve a concise power. The freedom and vitality of these works comes as a refreshing surprise.

The show continues through April 23.