Cheryl Humphreys: Second Skin
Sarah Brook Gallery is pleased to present “Second Skin,” a new body of work by Cheryl Humphreys, an artist who employs an expansive approach to printmaking, mining its material and metaphorical possibilities.
Torn by hand, dyed in vats, pressed with ink or found objects, Humphreys performs a number of processes on paper. She activates its permeable surface, testing the paper’s resilience with line, color and pressure– motivated by the transformative possibilities of printmaking more so than by its staid tradition of serial image making.
Humphreys gravitates towards a meditative range of color: the prints she pulls are nuanced monochromes of soft violets, greens, ochres, earthy blues or terracotta. In New Blue Son, symmetrically arranged squares and diamonds alternate across a grid to form a kaleidoscopic pattern. The artist often presents her editions together, positioned edge to edge like tiles, so that their tessellated fragments cohere into one whole, softly geometric, color field composition. A varying depth of field is created in the way Humphreys layers ink over dye, forming dark squares that anchor her compositions as distinguishing lines and paper edges radiate outward.
A hallmark of Humphreys practice is collecting. Scraps of paper, envelopes, and kitchen ephemera serve as raw material for her chance printmaking operations, quilting, or collage experiments. Recently she started employing woven produce bags as an object for mark-making, inking, arranging, and embossing a bag onto her print matrix, playing with its emptied, net-like form. The bags conjure natural or bodily imagery, breasts or a far-off shoreline. They serve as sketchier, illusionistic passages which balance solid swathes of chroma. The resulting optical effect is entrancing; there’s something meditative in slowing down to see how Humphreys makes a band of color leap forward or recede.
Through the repetitive actions of her printmaking process – rolling an inked brayer, wiping a plate, hanging prints to dry, cleaning the press, smoothing its felt top – Humphreys embodies acts of domesticity and care. Her practice could be performed as a physical approximation of cleaning the home or doing the family’s laundry, yet this labor amounts to a dozen or so visual permutations, methodical and exploratory. Works for Second Skin emerged post-partum after the joyful birth of Humphreys’ son, Cy, and finds the artist shedding an old life to enter her work anew. What she carries forward is an iterative approach to image making, a newfound boldness that relies on a fastidiousness and devotion to materials; a commitment to the artist archetype as MOTHER. She pushes her form to test our visual acuity, reminding us of the auratic pleasure of looking.
