The Dazzling Printmaking of Judy Pfaff

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Photo courtesy St. Kate Arts

Judy Pfaff - End of the Rain triptych

When I heard Judy Pfaff was showing at the St. Kate–the Arts Hotel, I had immediate visions of whimsical installations. After reading the show’s announcement and gathering that “End of the Rain” (through Nov. 14), curated by J Myszka Lewis & Sona Pastel-Daneshgar, would be based on her printmaking, in particular her work with the Tandem Press in Madison over the past 20 years, I began to manage my expectations. Which as it turns out was unnecessary. The work in the show delivered reminded me of her dazzling proficiency in printmaking and its symbiosis with her sculpture.

The prints at St. Kate have a depth and richness equivalent if dissimilar to her installations. A 44 x 99-inch … wind-deer and the honey-grass from 2017 is comprised on multiple layers of organic, biomorphic, landscape-y imagery printed on layers of clear film. The complex sandwich of swirling marks pulsates with the teeming haphazard organization of a marshy ecosystem. Even in its general flatness it flexes toward greater dimensionality. To anyone familiar with her greater body of work and its spatial ambitions, the layered flatness feels like a jack-in-the-box that could happily expand outward in all directions and take over a room at any moment.

The vertically-oriented multimedia work Origami employs an earthy collagraph—a print from the raise portions of actual objects—of clustered seedpods under layers astral networks of red lines and points, the entire composition made transparent by their impregnation with hot wax. The result is a composition pulsating between macro and micro, representational and abstract, and personal and universal. The layers themselves read as both actual and conceptual, a duality very much reflective of Pfaff’s general artistic point-of-view.

Mysterious Images

Oion, Uqbar, Oris, Tursius is, superficially, a flat sequential work comprised of mysterious circular images, some of which seem drawn from abstraction and universal color and others informed by the natural world and its earthen palette. Turns out it is inspired by a story by Jorge Luis Borges, who was himself interested in the relationship between imagined and perceived worlds. In a much different manner than Origami this piece also flirts with ideas of expanding space. This act of seriality and accumulation of marks across space implies space and time in the same way a reel of film does.

As all the other work in the show flirts with expansion and contraction, abstraction and reality, the eponymous multi-panel work End of the Rain initially seems more overtly representational and somewhat less ambiguous that other work. The etched and dyed images of bucolic homes feel more pictorial and preoccupied with technical aspects of printmaking. Yet the largest of the four panels bears traces of what feel like cosmic rings or magnetic resonances that take the scene from physical to metaphysical. The wall text notes that this work is a “beacon” and “anchor” for other works in the show, which feels about right; “End of the Rain” tethers the work to the prosaic and familiar, allowing the rest of the show to breath and swell into more mysterious realms.

I do an exercise in my own drawing class in which I ask my students to create a drawing drawn from the space of their “minds.” Invariably I receive a bunch of head silhouettes with symbolic references to various common anxieties, aspirations, and goals. Rarely does anyone give me a metaphor: a network, an ecosystem, a school of fish, a Rube Goldberg machine … anything other than a cross-section of a head filled with words. Judy Pfaff would get an “A” on that assignment. I’m sure she could teach my course. Now that I think about it, I think I’ll show them some of the in “End of the Rain” before we begin that assignment, just to suppress their literal thinking and get their minds thinking about the vast interconnectedness of the mental and physical domains we pass through every day.