 A.P.E. Ltd. Gallery
126 Main Street Northampton, MA 01060 Phone: 413.586.5553 Fax: 413.387.6027 Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Sunday: 12-5 Friday: 12-8 Closed Monday |
Current
Photography by Stan Sherer
February February 6 - March 2, 2014 Artist Reception: Friday, Feb. 14, 5-8 pm Printographs “Printographs” is the intriguing title of Northampton photographer Stan Sherer’s exhibition of new, experimental work, which will be shown at the A.P.E. Gallery through the month of February. What are printographs? "Since 2003 I have been exploring ways of bringing digital photography and printmaking together,” says Sherer. “For me, making art means making things with my hands. Traditional printmaking, with its plate making, inking, and press operations, is a truly hands-on, labor-intensive process. Photography was too, in the film-and-darkroom days, but now in our era of digital printing, the hand is relegated to mouse-clicks.” “Printographs” includes selections from two series of prints Sherer has made in the last decade. One series, “Lantern Slides,” is based on glass lantern slides that were used in science lectures at Smith College a century ago. These scientifically significant artifacts captured his imagination: "They are beautiful as objects, and they conveyed scientific theory at the highest level, for their time. I followed my instincts and, in the end, fused my own photographs with them. I am now presenting these lantern slides in a new form." Sherer calls the second series "Jacquard Prints," in honor of the Lyon silk weaver Joseph Marie Jacquard whose new loom revolutionized textiles two hundred years ago. Jacquard combined elements of the ancient drawloom with a new technology of his own invention: coding on punched cards the instructions for raising and lowering of groups of threads. Indeed, the Jacquard loom was a precursor to the computer. In his Jacquard prints, Sherer combines traditional printmaking techniques with digital tools, and the surface of these prints has a woven quality. Sherer’s wife, Marjorie Senechal, Louise Wolff Kahn Professor Emerita of Mathematics and History of Science and Technology at Smith College, discovered the lantern slides in a Clark Science Center sub-basement about a decade ago. Several appear in her recent book, I Died for Beauty: Dorothy Wrinch and the Cultures of Science. On Saturday, February 22, at the A.P.E. Gallery at 2 p.m., Senechal will talk on “The Brief Life of Lantern Slides: a Forgotten Revolution in Science and Art.” |
