Wednesday, September 17, 2014
7–8 p.m.
Collins Library Room 020
Nicole Pietrantoni is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, where she teaches printmaking and book arts. Her piece, Precipitous, is one of the works featured in the exhibit Book Power Redux at Collins Library. It is collection of five hand bound accordion books that expand to create a life-sized panoramic image of a rising sea.
“As books, the works gesture to the authority of the encyclopedic and the cataloging of natural specimens. As an installation, they dismantle sublime images through cuts, folds and halftone dots. The overlaid poems by Devon Wootten are appropriations from a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change titled, “Climate Change and Water.” With a specific interest in printmaking’s historic relationship to representation, in this work I gesture to humans’ role in constructing and idealizing landscape. Referencing 19th-century panoramas as well as Romantic painting, the work nods to a particularly fraught period in our relationship to nature. Similarly, today’s changing landscape demands an examination of the tension between the enjoyment of beautiful, idealized landscapes and an awareness of their ecological complexity.”
This event was made possible through the support of the Catharine Gould Chism Fund, University of Puget Sound.