In Brief: Screenprint Biennial at ACCR

Christopher Cannon, Runaways on Hunt Street screenprint

On a recent shopping excursion to River Street in Troy, I abandoned my spouse and ducked into the Arts Center of the Capital Region, where a gallery full of dazzlingly rich colors greeted me. The 2016 Screenprint Biennial, on view through Dec. 23, is also hosted at Collar Works in Troy, and is just terrific. After it closes, a selected portion of the show will be mounted in January at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking in Norwalk, Connecticut. I'd say, if you miss it here, it might be well worth the trip to Norwalk. But try to catch it here if you can.

Jeffrey Dell, Dreamland III screenprint

Organized by printmaker and RPI lecturer Nathan Meltz, the show handily demonstrates that a blue-collar medium that grew up in the golden age of advertising and was adapted into a fine art in the '60s and '70s is still wonderfully alive and well.

Also called silkscreen, the squeegee-centric process is conducive to a great variety of applications, including the use of hand-cut templates, highly detailed photo-based matrices, and printing on fabric. It is also relatively cheap to do (requiring only well-ventilated space, a big sink, and some drying racks - no printing press needed). This leads to endless possibilities, many of which are explored in this second edition of the East Coast Screenprint Biennial (as some sources refer to it), which debuted in 2014.

Among the applications on view at the ACCR (sorry, I still haven't seen the Collar Works part of the show) are gag hair product packages, rough-cut monoprints, a fanciful stuffed-fabric landscape, and 2D work ranging from the flat and cartoonish to the photo-realistic to the elegantly abstract. The one thing it all seems to have in common is that irresistibly rich color that comes from pushing juicy ink through a fabric screen.

Kudos to Meltz and the two hosting organizations for taking on this project - I eagerly look forward to the 2018 edition.