Simon Fraser University
Engaging the World

Denise Hawrysio: Situational Prints

April 28 - June 23, 2007
SFU Gallery

Denise Hawrysio has worked in many media over the past twenty- five years, including film, video and installation. Throughout that period she has also pursued the conceptual possibilities of printmaking, especially in relation to her notion of site-specificity. Hawrysio produces her prints by employing external agents, both human and physical (such as cars driving over etching plates). The prints are a collaboration between the artist and the world as she finds it; the actions and motions of Hawrysio’s surroundings leave their mark on her art, with the result that each print is a still, a frozen interface between the materials of art and the physicality of the world.

This exhibition comes at a time when printmaking’s stock has fallen. Art schools and university art departments throughout North America have closed, or are contemplating the closure of their printmaking departments. The theoretical turn that art has taken since the 1970s has not worked in the medium’s favour, as many printmakers have blithely allowed the shift to conceptualized practices to pass them by.

Denise Hawrysio’s print projects have kept a step ahead of current theory, and have incorporated unique social issues and actions. They are the result of non-art situations she has catalyzed or planned, and of Situationist ideas of intervention and the “construction of events.” Hawrysio uses collective actions, quasi-rational repetitions, negations, and palimpsest creation, often mixed with subjects that address social concerns in visually oblique ways.

Denise Hawrysio is a Canadian artist who has lived mainly in London, UK since 1984. She has exhibited at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin), Uppsala Konstmuseum (Sweden), The Showroom (London), Mercer Union (Toronto), Dare Dare Gallery (Montreal), and the Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art (Copenhagen). Recent residencies include the MacDowell Colony in the United States and the Banff Centre. She currently teaches at the University of the Arts London.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 24-page colour catalogue with texts by Ian Wallace and Bill Jeffries.

Curated by Bill Jeffries.

Events

Opening Reception and Artist Talk
Saturday April 28, 2007 3 - 6pm
SFU Gallery, Burnaby

Lunchtime Tours of the Exhibition
Wednesday, May 2, 12:05pm
Thursday, May 3, 12:35pm