Recently, I attended the opening of the current exhibition, Under Pressure: Group Printmaking Exhibition at the Degenstein Gallery at Susquehanna University. Two artists who proved particularly popular were Katy Seals and Kathryn Polk. Kathryn Polk’s prints present tight, linear images of fantastic scenes that seem to be drawn from fairy tales or nightmares. Katy Seal’s, on the other hand, offers painterly portraits of gap-toothed quarterback princesses and other scenes from disturbed Americana.
For some reason, when looking at both of these artist’s work together, I couldn’t get Lynda Barry’s Ernie Pook’s Comeek series from the 1990’s out of my head. It’s as if Barry had two daughters, Polk who inherited her mother’s obsession for graphic details and story-telling and Seals who continues the family relationship with nasty, pimply-faced youth. It wasn’t so much that I thought either of these artists were derivative (and in many ways their work is quite different from Barry’s and from each other) it was more that they, like Barry, evoked a mood of anxious nostalgia. Polk’s images contain artifacts from the past (a 1940’s school-desk, a phonograph) in some unlikely scene (the desk is on fire.) And Seal’s prints of teen girls at the state fair, corn-dog mustard dribbled on their unicorn t-shirt suggest that the past (like her printmaking style) is a sloppy affair with color dripping all over.
I don’t want to generalize, but free association leads me to other contemporary artists of the mission-school variety with their predilection for surreal figuration and hipsters with their mid-century school-globe adorned Brooklyn apartments. Is there something in the air, or do I just need to calm down and have another glass of that wonderful General Washington Tavern Porter?
