Essay on Longyear Gallery Exhibit by Lynn Wood
Louise Kalin’s solo show of prints at Longyear Gallery, entitled “First Impressions, Second Thoughts,” held last November, featured a series of large prints whose bark-like textures and fissures seemed evolved from nature herself. Alternately, they read as palimpsests, fragments of ancient inscriptions worn away by the forces of weather over the eons. The mysterious beauty of these pieces is a tribute to Louise’s layered technique, which literally incorporates the passage of time: printed from a single plate and varying in chroma and tone, the pieces were created nearly 40 years ago, when Louise had a residency at the MacDowell Colony. The plate itself is layered, incorporating remnants of wallpaper and fabric, which the artist then sealed with polymers. The handmade paper on which they were printed “soaks up the image,” further abstracting it and letting the process dictate the result. “There’s a sense of using things that no longer had value and the power of the image, in all its variations,” Louise says. In a kind of “Second Thoughts,” she revisited some of the prints and collaged them with added layers, drawing and bits of bark.
The show also included her solar etchings, in which the metal plate is covered with a light-sensitive coating and exposed to sunlight or a black light, creating a relief. “Red Earth,” made from two such plates, suggests sky and land forms catching the last rays of the setting sun, although the scratched incisions, connoting geological formations as well as establishing the flatness of the surface, resist any literal reading of a landscape. Yet another body of work was three gorgeous “dispersion prints,” images of water and mountain ranges in which her color photographs of the landscape were printed on the reverse side of photographic paper, causing the ink to spread in the manner of a monoprint. To create the images, she worked together with Rhinebeck-based photographer Chad Kleitsch, scanning and enlarging the images, printing digital, archival prints. The pieces read as bands of dark, rich color against a twilit sky, riven midway by the gleam of a lake or river, a landscape reduced to its poetic essence. “It’s a trip through my experiments in printmaking and mixed-media,” she says, summing up the show.
Louise’s penchant for experimentation harks back to her growing up in a family of artists—her father and brother were painters and her mother taught art. She won a full scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design, where she studied drawing, printmaking, and illustration and upon graduation, married, moved to Concord, Massachusetts, and became the graphic designer for the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. She then moved to New Hampshire and did both exhibition work and graphic design for nonprofits, started a newspaper with three other women and, after her prints were discovered and collected by the director of the Currier Museum of Art, upon his recommendation applied and was accepted at the MacDowell Colony. That was in 1987, and it was life-changing. Afterwards she rented studio space in an old mill building in Wilton, New Hampshire, traveled to New York City to visit her MacDowell friends, and, newly divorced, moved to a carriage house on the Stanford White estate with Louis Asekoff, a poet whom she had met at MacDowell (and became her long-time husband). She ran a gallery in Stony Brook before moving with Louis in 1998 to a farmhouse outside Tivoli, where she established a studio in the barn on the property and has lived and worked ever since. (Her accomplishments, however, extended beyond the studio: from 1998 to 2004, she was the director of the Rhinebeck Chamber of Commerce).
While living in New Hampshire she showed at MacGowan Fine Arts and says she was influenced by Josef Albers and traditional quilts, which infused her work with a sense of geometric structure and strong color harmonies. She describes “First Impressions, Second Thoughts” as a survey of her print techniques and evolving images. “My thing is trying out new processes,” Louise says. “The sweep of it all—time spent in the studio, taking workshops, discovering a new technique or imagery--has been important to me. There’s an experimental effort, yet always a consistency of integrity of materials and technique. It’s personal, but also about the creative journey.”