Archive 2008-09
Denise Hawrysio
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture theatre
- Start: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 11:00:00 GMT
- End: Wed, 19 Nov 2008 13:00:00 GMT
Denise Hawrysio is a printmaker. Her work emerges from an ongoing dialogue with contemporary theory.
Hawrysio’s prints emerge from her ongoing dialogue with contemporary theory. Her influences include the work of Hanne Darboven, On Kawara and Joseph Beuys as well as strategies drawn from Earthworks, Happenings and Fluxus. Early on in her life in art, Hawrysio knew the serial music of Philip Glass and Steve Reich and of ‘language-as-drawing’ as characterized by the work of Cy Twombly. As a result, much of her work has an aleatory quality manifested by a panoply of collective forces she employs as tools of her trade, including mechanical, human and geological phenomena. She seems to conceive of the printmaking plate as both a minilandscape and a stage for cultural production, in which her semi-controlled acts of marking plates micro-mirror the macro marks left by Earthworks artists such as Michael Heizer.
The artists Hawrysio encountered after moving to San Francisco in the early 1980s paved the way for another aspect of her printmaking process: the unpredictability of socially engaged, performative art. San Francisco was then home to very particular modes of production: artist groups such as Survival Research Laboratories, conceptual artists like Bonnie Sherk, and performance artists such as Tom Marioni. And if Beuys’s blackboard text scratchings were an influence on Hawrysio, his art of social engagement was even more so. She has, for instance, cold-called farming families to ask them to mark or draw on her etching plates. Ordinary people have marked her plates with their messages – their words and scrawls are a record of directness and unmediated simplicity, of a type that no one schooled in art could ever make.