Exhibition: expand, contract, expand again

21 May - 7 June 2024 | PCA Gallery, Southbank, VIC

Contemporary printmaking is permeated by paradox, whereby it simultaneously relies upon and collapses tradition. There is an inherent tension between the impetus of maintaining and acknowledging print’s technical specificity and process-driven nature, and the allure to push, pull and stretch its boundaries. 

Curated by More Than Reproduction, this group exhibition explores the materiality of contemporary print-practice, departing from convention to present new ways of working with and understanding the potential of an impervious, yet increasingly malleable medium. With printmaking existing within the interstitial depths of the past and the seductive surface of the present, this exhibition aims to navigate the shift towards print hybridity, welcoming the incursions of other mediums, utilising unorthodox substrates, and engaging in dimensionality within an expanded field.

Artists Bridget Baskerville, Elizabeth Knuckey, and Bella La Spina adopt haptic print methodologies to traverse multiple locations and temporalities. The exhibition is underpinned by notions of site, positionality and transition. This is seen through site-specific screenprinting, archival investigations of place, and experimentations with site as an active collaborator.