Life is hard out there for an undergraduate at A&D. A lot of energy and commitment are exhausted in years spent moving between twenty page research papers and lofty attempts at solving the world’s problems through creative process. And that God forsaken weather all the time too! So what’s an aspiring artist to do when confronted with the shock and awe of a freshly shellacked, seductive block of birch plywood seemingly begging for a little action from a U-Knife?
Don’t let my sarcasm fool you, when I was a student I was invested in some issues. I had a bone to pick with the Catholic Church, which seemed woefully preoccupied with shamefully skirting massive child abuse scandals. I had a feeling or two about Bush administrations and conflicts in Darfur to boot. But on the recommendation of a respected faculty, I decided to enroll in printmaking to see what kind of avenues I could explore. What’s the worst that could happen?
Blocks of wood, rigid knives, splinters and a demanding instructor turned out to be the worst (inevitably best) things that could happen. With years of formal drawing training at U of M and other various art institutions throughout the country, I thought I could breeze through a few woodcuts and etchings to inevitably get back to my CFC soapbox. I was wrong. Carving that wood takes some elbow grease. There is also this thing called ‘margin for error’, which just doesn’t seem to exist with printmaking. Time is another issue. Making prints takes time, and when those massive research papers are piling up, and its just so darn cold outside, you might not know what to do with yourself besides slamming your head into that block of wood for a forced night of solid sleep.
This is getting dramatic, but passion is what comes out of prints you know? One memorable project from my time in printmaking was the exquisite corpse project. This assignment, rooted in a surrealist game of blindly linking individually drawn segments of a body, brought our class and our work together in truly unique ways. The key to the project was the division of labor. Each student was randomly assigned a segment of the body. Registration marks for the spaces above or below each segment were the only guidelines. This in turn caused each student to approach a single idea with the knowledge that they could rely on the group to pull the final piece together.
What happened when we combined our prints changed my perception of the process of establishing meaning in a work, and inevitably how I understood the act of creation itself. After what appeared to be weeks of individually focused labor leading toward random visual encounters, there stood the image of Bush attached to a monstrous body. There was the gaudy sorority buttocks locked in obnoxious sweat pants attached to a raccoon head. There was the Dutch oven. I mean what the hell right? We didn’t set out to make these things, yet they nevertheless revealed themselves through work in the studio. The reward for that commitment? A series of massive prints covering an entire hallway. Suddenly my soapbox looked kind of ridiculous, and suddenly I knew what I wanted to do with the rest of my time.
-Evan McLaughlin
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